When it comes to freaky families, whom do you think of first? The Munsters, the Addamses, the Borgias, the Romanovs, the Tenenbaums, or the Trumps? How about the House of Atreus? The list is a distinguished one, and it’s blessed by the arrival of a new bunch, in Miranda July’s “Kajillionaire.” Say hello to the Dynes, who number precisely three: Robert (Richard Jenkins), his wife, Theresa (Debra Winger), and their daughter, Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood), who is twenty-six. They may lack imperial trappings, and their wealth, as yet, is not the stuff of legend. In the noble art of clipping coupons, however, or of collecting the half-eaten snacks that other passengers have left behind on airplanes, the Dynes are unsurpassed.
They live in Los Angeles, which is something of a joke, since they don’t have a car. Or, for that matter, a home. Their current dwelling is a bubble factory, if you please, where they bed down on the office floor. Clouds of pink foam keep frothing through cracks at the top of the wall and creeping downward—a silly, non-scary version of the blood that surges in from the elevator’s edge in “The Shining” (1980). Needless to say, the Dynes are behind on rent; the building manager looks terribly upset about it, though his tears are involuntary. “I have no filters,” he says. In a bid to elude him, the family goes into contortions whenever they pass the factory, bending down or, in the case of Old Dolio, leaning perilously backward, like a limbo dancer. Filmed from the side, in a travelling shot, they look like an experimental-ballet troupe.
Fans of July, who directed “Me and You and Everyone We Know” (2005) and “The Future” (2011), will be cool with this level of weirdness, because she herself is forever medium cool. The foibles of her characters require no explanation, and we never quite learn how the Dynes became the Dynes. Did they once have money, a place of their own, and steady jobs, and then lose everything, or is dispossession their natural state? Either way, they now subsist on scavenging and scams; the movie kicks off with a heist, as Old Dolio—who, like her mother, has a long and listless curtain of hair—enters a post office in a series of leaps and rolls. She looks like a hippie commando. Once inside, she filches packages from other people’s mailboxes, with a view to selling the contents or claiming a refund. As crime goes, it lacks a little pizzazz. Imagine the hoodlums in “Heat” (1995) storming a bank and coming away with a necktie.
While you’re wondering how long the rest of the movie can, or should, noodle along in this kooky fashion, up springs a plot. A young woman, Melanie (Gina Rodriguez), makes the family’s acquaintance and, bringing along a bright idea for a hustle, joins the slipstream of their turbid days. In particular, she befriends Old Dolio—who was named, apparently, for a lottery-winning homeless man, in the hope that he might offer her a legacy. (No luck.) There’s a lovely scene in which the two women visit a supermarket, with Old Dolio pointing out the aisles where, thanks to a security-camera blind spot, shoplifting would be a steal. Melanie’s plan is bolder still: she’s going to pay for what’s in her cart. Talk about radical.
The movie needs Rodriguez, whose demeanor, upbeat and no-nonsense, interrupts the lilt of eccentricity that prevails elsewhere. Whereas Old Dolio’s voice is a low and halting drone, all too fitting for someone so woefully unsocialized, Melanie delivers her lines with a snap and a smile. Yet even she has her secrets. Having told the Dynes that she’s an assistant to an ophthalmologist at Cedars-Sinai, she later admits to working for a regular optician, selling bifocals to the aged. It’s not a terrible lie, but it bolsters our impression that July’s characters are not so much being themselves as playing themselves, so to speak, and continually tweaking who they wish to be. Hence the unnerving ease with which, after sneaking into the house of a sick and elderly man (“He’s trying to die,” Old Dolio reports), they settle in at their leisure. Theresa dons an apron and serves cake; Robert watches golf on TV. “I think I will mow the lawn tomorrow,” he announces. They could get used to this existence. Millions of folks do.
No one seeks out a movie like this in search of rage, let alone political heft, yet there are stirrings of disquiet—if not of outright protest—as Melanie urges Old Dolio to step back, for the first time, and inspect her parents from a distance. (We all attempt this, at our own pace; to an extent, she’s just a late starter.) Is their attitude something worse than wacky? In a pinch, would they rob their daughter? Might they be, as Melanie dares to suggest, “monsters”? What’s unusual about “Kajillionaire,” and what makes it July’s most absorbing film to date, is that you can feel her testing and challenging her own aptitude for whimsy. Think of her as an American descendant, many times removed, of Edward Lear, whose creatures, though frequently charming, are badgered by frustration or doomed to a punishing solitude. The Dynes remind me of the Jumblies, who, in Lear’s telling, recklessly went to sea in a sieve, crying out, “How wise we are!”
Thus it is that Robert, strolling down a street, pauses to admire his reflection in a store window. “Look at this guy,” he declares. “I feel like a senator!” Not that most senators would be prepared, as Robert is, to go around with an untucked shirt. (Those of us who love Richard Jenkins for his unique fusion of the absent-minded and the frowningly intense will delight in his portrayal of Robert, who is not so weary of the world that he won’t milk it for every drop he can get.) When Melanie says that “most happiness comes from dumb things,” she’s being honest rather than sententious, and July uses “Kajillionaire” to present her credentials as a transcendentalist of the humdrum. Look at Old Dolio buying fat bags of snacks in a convenience store, in the aftermath of a very minor earthquake, which she believes to be “the big one.” Notice the sunlight flaring through her hair as she dances, badly and wildly, or the extreme closeup of her fingers as she prizes off Melanie’s acrylic nails, making every effort not to hurt her. Life can be as mean as sin, and pleasure can pop at any moment. You have to catch the bubbles while you can.
If you have enjoyed the company of the Dynes, watch out. You may find it hard to adjust to more orthodox souls, however grave their problems. Take the Smythsons, of East Hampton, whose saga we follow in “The Artist’s Wife.” Richard Smythson (Bruce Dern) is a celebrated painter. He is married to Claire (Lena Olin), who renounced her own artistic career, years ago, in favor of his. By an earlier relationship, he has a daughter, Angela (Juliet Rylance), from whom he is estranged. He has never met her son, Gogo (Ravi Cabot-Conyers), who is six. The winter of Richard’s discontent is a harsh season, and he has all but frozen solid, slathering a canvas with ice-white paint. He keeps losing his manners and his temper—as creative persons, for some reason, are allowed or encouraged to do. What Claire fears, though, is that he is also mislaying his mind.
It is soon confirmed that Richard has Alzheimer’s, though whether the film, directed by Tom Dolby, is specifically about dementia—as were “Away from Her” (2007), with Julie Christie, and “Still Alice” (2015), with Julianne Moore—is open to debate. The medical aspects of the case begin and end with a sequence in which Claire picks up a prescription. Other than that, she seems oddly unbothered by practicalities, nipping into New York for the day, or for a boozy night, and leaving her husband to fend for himself. What grieves her is the way that he turns on her, as if to mock the sacrifice that she has made. Is it his recent decline that causes such rages to erupt, or have they always been there, below the crust? Lurking in this tale is a scalding proposition: maybe artists come with a dementia of their own, quick to blank out the needs of others without any help from a degenerative disease.
If only the style of “The Artist’s Wife” could scald with equal intent. Alas, it opts for plangency, with a musical score applied like a gentle balm, and a plot that hungers for healing—absurdly so, given the incurable nature of Richard’s plight. Claire has a near-fling with Gogo’s handsome babysitter, Danny (Avan Jogia), and even he suffers from inventive yearnings, solemnly presenting her with a CD of his songs. Jeez, couldn’t someone here be nonartistic? Any chance of an accountant showing up? On the other hand, if it’s serious choler you want, then Dern, at eighty-four, is still your guy, with the toothy thrust of his jaw as militant as ever, and his grin morphing into a snarl. As for Olin, she makes Claire both ravishing and ravaged, and I couldn’t help recalling Ingmar Bergman’s “After the Rehearsal” (1984), in which the youthful Olin played an actress who, like Claire, did intimate battle with an older man. The closeups were unwavering, and the whole thing was shot without music and set on the bare boards of a theatre. That’s the way to do it. ♦
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