Romantic comedy puts a fresh spin on timeloop trope
“Palm Springs” is an unusual and imaginative romantic comedy that takes the central idea of “Groundhog Day” and builds on it. It features East Bay native and “Saturday Night Live” alum Andy Samberg opposite TV actress Cristin Milioti (“Black Mirror,” “How I Met Your Mother”) in a role that should make her a film star.
It takes place on the day of a wedding, at which Nyles (Samberg) is a guest and Sarah (Milioti) is the maid of honor. Nyles is buoyant yet detached, while Sarah is witty but down on herself. They seem to make a connection, but the next morning they find themselves at the start of the previous day.
We soon realize that this is the source of Nyles’ detachment. He has been repeating the same day for a very long time — probably years. We know, for example, that he has been killed and has committed suicide on multiple occasions, but he keeps waking up in bed on the same day. But for Sarah, this is all new. She is newly stuck in this “Groundhog Day”like purgatory.
Having it be two people, not one, trapped in the time loop fundamentally changes the experience. Now there’s another person in the same boat, another person who remembers what happened the day before. There’s a relationship there that can grow.
There’s also someone to share the joke with. One of the funnier bits in “Palm Springs” involves the two amusing themselves at other people’s expense, as when they break up the reception by insisting (and proving) that there’s a bomb inside the cake.
Basically, Nyles and Sarah do what any two people might do if forced to live in such a circumstance. Some days they have fun with it, and some days they’re depressed. Some days they’re flailing around for ways to escape, and other days they’re almost resigned to what’s happening to them.
In this way, “Palm Springs,” which was conceived and filmed long before COVID19, arrives at a time in which its audience is having something like the experience depicted in the movie. Not only are our days similar, but we’re experiencing the unexplainable cycles within that sameness. That is, we’re finding out firsthand that we can feel completely different — content and cozy or fearful and frustrated — on days that are otherwise identical.
Yet ultimately, the measure of “Palm Springs” isn’t the cleverness or resonance of its premise but rather how creatively it fulfills that premise. It succeeds through a series of unexpected and sometimes wild incidents, which show the characters, despite their living the same day, growing, changing and developing. There’s no sense of sameness for us as writer Andy Siara and director Max Barbakow devise a series of unexpected turns and keep us interested.
Samberg is his familiar engaging self. The revelation here is the comparatively unknown Milioti. She has superb comic timing, lots of authority and directness, and she can act. The extra something that “Palm Springs” has — the hint of seriousness, the sense that it’s not only about the laughs — comes from her.