Kajillionaire

“It is, among many other things, a metaphor for generational dissent, of breaking from tradition and expectation and customs that just don’t work anymore.”– writer/director Miranda July. (Me and You and Everyone We Know, No One Belongs Here More Than You and It Chooses You) none of which I’ve seen, but am now curious to go back and visit.

The filmmaker’s “Kajillionaire” description really struck me, because it’s a movie I didn’t expect to identify with in anyway. But when looked at in this light, I realize I do.  My mother has gotten to an age where she wants company more often and hates that me and my siblings don’t live within 10-15 mins of her.  She really resents that we won’t uproot our lives and move back to the neighborhood where we grew up. She feels like because she and her sister always lived close by to their mother and stopped by frequently, this is the only way for mothers and their grown off-spring to have a relationship.  In Kajillionaire, the generational expectation is far more damaging.

Robert Dyne (Richard Jenkins ) is a freak about tremors always warning about the “big one”.  His wife Theresa Dyne (unrecognizable Debra Winger) is unfeeling and walks with a limp that’s never explained. The two gave up on playing it straight in life. Money got tight, jobs got scares, options were few and far between, so they began a life of grifting and creating cons to survive.

And if this was the life they decided worked best for them as a couple, (well, most of it is illegal), but still, do you.  But because life tends to be unfair, where people who’d make wonderful parents are often barren and people who make damaging parents are gifted with life, Robert & Theresa have a daughter and name her Old Dolio, (Evan Rachel Wood) after a homeless man who won the lottery. The couple figured giving him a namesake would ingratiate them in a way that the old man would share some of his good fortune. It didn’t happen, and yet, they kept the name. Never shortening it or giving the girl a nickname; and poor Old Dolio, 17 years of age, is a shell of a human being. Completely emotionally underdeveloped, monotone voice, deadpan expression.  She’s been trained how to avoid cameras when stealing or shoplifting and how to avoid the landlord of their so-called home in an abandoned office space of a Bubble Factory, that’s a whole thing!

But it isn’t until Old Dolio sits in on an expectant mother’s “positive parenting” class in exchange for some money.  And her parents, during an air travel scheme, befriend a light-hearted, beautiful, young woman, Melanie (Gina Rodriguez), that she begins to question her parent’s way of life and their expectations of her acceptance of it.

JULY: When you said you’d watched it again, my inclination was to ask, “How is it doing? I haven’t talked to it since quarantine.” … I wonder what it’ll be like for people watching on their laptops…. It would be hard to get me to watch any of my movies once I’m done, but I have been thinking about this one, remembering back to when I was writing it, trying at the time to get across this sense of anxiety, and the earthquake in the movie seeming like a way to do that. The idea of a big one, the big one. And now I’m like, “Oh, we’re in the big one.”…  READ MORE Interview Magazine

The film is filled with gentle absurdism in an untraditional world. We don’t have to like the characters or their actions in order to feel invited in.  There’s a loping rhythm that allows the audience to wonder how something so peculiar is going to end, and yet not feeling a sense of urgency to get there.

T&T @largeassmovieblogs rating: 3.5 outta 5