If I had known Sundance 2020 would be the last great influx of live and in-person cinema I’d have for six months or more, I might have stayed up for just one more screening a time or two more. But I’d still have walked away more than satisfied with Kajillionare as the title that closed my own personal festival. To say that Miranda July’s wry crime comedy defies expectations would be to understate it.
Rather, it defies the expectation of defying expectations. From one moment to the next it’s quite impossible to chart a course. The first great feat in running the gauntlet of Kajillionaire is wrap your mind around Evan Rachel Wood’s new register and uncanny ability for physical comedy. Her conflicted Old Dolio would be as cartoonish as the 90s Cartoon Network Ed her style invokes if it weren’t for the deep emotion she packs into nearly every moment she spends on screen.
What’s much more difficult to come to terms with is Richard Jenkins as a scruffy “skimmer” who dismisses his daughter as readily as he sexualizes and endears himself to Melanie, a young woman who finds herself part of the family’s next desperate bid to make rent. Melanie (Gina Rodriguez) is resplendent and social, comfortable in her own skin, but an entire country removed from an overbearing, if well-meaning mother. Meanwhile, Debra Winger’s Theresa stands in sharp contrast, somehow disdainful of her own child, but unwilling to recognize that those things she perceives as flaws are nothing more than a desire to be loved.
Ostensibly, Kajillionaire is about fringe-dwellers embarking on a bad deal, but it’s ultimately about a young woman who got dealt a bad hand breast crawling her way to something better. That last bit will come full circle for you if you watch the film, I promise.
Perhaps most impressively, Miranda July brings surrealism to a decidedly Los Angeles-centric picture without ever grasping at the familiar LA strings. It’s the unseen side of the City of Angels where sometimes the only angel you can find comes into your life by way of a misplaced desire to live in an Ocean’s film.
Were it not occasionally uproarious, the whole affair would be utterly bleak. As it stands, it finds lift and light in Evan Rachel Wood and small turns of humanity that carry us from one twist of the knife to the next.