Movie Review: C'mon C'mon

 

There's a notion that's often floated out there by some purist cinephiles that cinema should always be seeking to explore or expose some kind of truth in the world. As great as that sounds in theory, that's a tricky ask for a couple reasons. 1. Not every film is playing by the rules of reality. 2.Truth doesn't have a universal definition when it's applied to someone's individual experiences. While I can't speak to the degree of "truth" present in C'mon C'mon for a litany of reasons, writer/director Mike Mills has at the very least made a family drama that handles its relationships and the problems that come with them in a much more real way than we're used to seeing portrayed on screen. 

The root of C'mon C'mon's drama stems from a phone call made by New York-based radio journalist Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix, in a reserved role that marks complete 180 from his five-alarm fire overacting in Joker) to his Los Angeles-based sister Viv (Gabby Hoffmann)-who he had not spoken to since their mother died of dementia a year earlier. During their conversation, Viv reveals that her estranged husband Paul (Scoot McNairy) is displaying erratic behavior caused by his mental illness and that she has to go up to his apartment in Oakland and convince him to get treatment. Wanting to help, Johnny volunteers to fly out and take care of Viv's son Jesse (Woody Norman) while she's in Oakland. After some initial awkwardness, Jesse and Johnny develop a bond that only strengthens when Johnny gets the opportunity to take Jesse back to New York and show him around a city that he's never been before. The jolly, fun time uncle/nephew arrangement begins to fall apart when Jesse starts to lash out and ask questions about what's really going on with Paul and why his mom left him behind while she went on this trip, which causes Johnny to become the stand-in parent he never wanted to be. Will their newly formed bond be able to weather the storm of reality setting in or will they return to their previous arrangement of being borderline strangers who barely speak or each other once Viv returns?    

C'mon C'mon has a really substantial understanding of the messy complexities of family dynamics and human emotions without ever veering into melodrama or vilifying its characters. Viv and Johnny's estrangement wasn't driven by some kind of bombshell soap opera involving greed, betrayal or backstabbing, it was just the product of a brother and sister not being on the same page on how to care for their dying mother. When Viv expresses to the single and childless Johnny that parenthood is an unrelentingly challenging journey that she sometimes wishes she never embarked on, she's treated as a person freely expressing the largely unspoken difficulties of parenthood and not some deadbeat mother who hates her son. At 9 years old, Jesse is at the weird stage of childhood where he's old enough to begin to understand what the adults in his life are really up to yet still young enough to regularly do irrational things like throwing temper tantrums when something doesn't go the way he wants it to. 

These conversations, scenarios and behaviors represent just a small sampling of the achingly real shit that take place in C'mon C'mon. The beauty of making a film that relies on heavy, reflective conversations to tell its story is that it becomes a vessel for unflinchingly honest expression. Not everything here is eloquently or even fully expressed because Mills and the trio of actors (Phoenix, Norman, Hoffmann) who get the bulk of the screentime understand the difficulty of being honest with yourself or others and assigning words to describe internal feelings. Acknowledging the difficulties of bringing true thoughts and feelings from the safety of one's own mind into a cruel outside world where they can be misinterpreted or harshly judged and preaching the importance of listening to other people when they have the courage to share these things out loud is a really delightful message for a film to have-especially in the current times where the desire for real human experiences seems to be more of a trendy suggestion than a realized action.          

C'mon C'mon is a welcome break from the corny, heavy-handed dramas that have populated the last few months of the calendar. While indie film veteran Mills' affinity for public radio interviews and voiceover montages occasionally obscures the multi-faceted power of the drama, a little bit of clumsy indulgence is no match for a moving, beautifully acted film that features so many impactful observations about being a human being and treats its characters and their respective issues with so much respect. Releasing something so understated and unglamorous at the height of awards season was a bit of a puzzling move by A24 since it's likely going to get overshadowed by the abundance of flashier, buzzier titles on the marketplace, but I'm ultimately glad that they did because there probably won't be another film released this month that shares C'mon C'mon's intimate, vulnerable DNA.  

Grade: B+