It felt weird.
We were back in cinemas, again. Another lockdown over, but this review felt weird. People weren’t sitting near each other. Masks were on. It felt weird.
C’mon C’mon (dir. Mike Mills) centers on Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) a radio journalist, who is going around the US interviewing kids on their perspective on modern life. His sister, Viv (Gaby Hoffmann) needs Johnny to take care of her son Jesse (Woody Norman) while she tries to help her partner, Jesse’s father, Paul (Scoot McNairy) who has started to have a bipolar episode.
The film adds complexity to this relationship by intercutting scenes of Johnny and Viv caring for their dying mother with dementia. Their differing views on how to look after her created a fracture in their relationship which still hasn’t been healed when we cut back to the present as Johnny takes over looking after Jesse so Viv can leave.
Johnny spends most of the film trying to build a relationship with his nephew Jesse he hardly knows. They are both broken people in different ways and they use each other to heal some of their trauma and learn to care about others.
Having just written that it sounds like a touching and sweet film, but it felt weird.
There were big long shots of external cities spaces showing the enormity of the world around Johnny and Jesse. These shots were juxtaposed with shots of their closeness, often inside. It felt weird. Was the director using this framing technique to say how small their problems were in relation to the size of the world around them. If so, why do we care about the characters? Or was it saying that even in this big world of ours, your story still counts? It felt weird.
Perhaps the line between film and tv have become so blurred but it felt like it was a tv movie more than a cinematic one. Perhaps the years of blockbusters have broken me and the cinema now needs to overwhelm my sensors before it can tug at my heartstrings. The movie seemed like it would have been more at home on my tv than me sitting in a cinema, it felt weird.
It did not help that I didn’t care at all for Jesse’s character. I found the young boy very unsympathetic. Maybe that says a lot about me. I couldn’t shake that Phoenix was on screen. He didn’t inhabit the character as he does with so many of his roles. He just felt like it was him on the screen. I felt wholly disconnected from the story, and to not care, felt weird.
C’mon C’mon is a film lover’s film, and I think of myself as a film lover but for whatever reason, I just didn’t connect with this movie on any level to make me want to go on a journey with the characters. It just felt, well you know, weird.
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe 15 February 2022