Review: C’mon C’mon

Joaquin Phoenix stars as a middle-aged radio journalist/interviewer whose current project involves interviewing kids and asking them about what they see in their future. Phoenix is called upon to look after his precocious nephew (Woody Norman) when his exhausted mother (Gaby Hoffmann) has to take care of her mentally ill ex (Scoot McNairy), the boy’s father. The film mostly focusses on the uncle-nephew relationship, whilst Phoenix also struggles to fit in work commitments.

 

Although I still haven’t quite forgiven him for “I’m Still Here”, I think Joaquin Phoenix is the best actor currently working and try to catch up with any film he’s in. This 2022 Mike Mills (“Thumbsucker”, “Beginners”) B&W film didn’t seem to get a lot of word spoken about it, and now that I’ve seen it I can attest to the reason: It’s utterly forgettable. It’s all pleasant and nice and well-acted across the board, but…it’s also basically nothing. It’s familiar, incredibly minor, and I have to say it’s also been inappropriately lensed in B&W by Robbie Ryan (who irritated the hell out of me with his fish-eyed work on “The Favourite”). I love B&W movies greatly, but here the B&W threw me off. It distracted me by making me wonder why it exists at all. It gives the film a flat, drab quality and seems to lack any real purpose, which likely wasn’t the purpose. When you add all the literary and interview stuff it gives the film a layer of pretentiousness that serves to remove you from the story and characters. That’s why I’m surprised it’s got 94% on Rotten Tomatoes with praise for its apparent warmth and compassion. I found it remote and drab.

 

I also never quite got what the connection was between the plot and the interviews Phoenix conducts in the film about the future. It was a bit of a shrug from me there. I have to say that Mills is also under the impression that young Woody Norman’s character is a lot more interesting than he actually is. He seemed like a perfectly normal, perfectly uninteresting kid to me. A bit more verbose than usual perhaps, but that’s nothing new in the movies either. Also not helping things is that the writer-director serves up a meandering and particularly contrived screenplay. The idea of Hoffmann’s character being stranded for much of the film, forcing Phoenix (who is terrific, by the way) to take care of his nephew is third-rate 80s Ron Howard-ish serio-comic stuff, you could almost see Michael Keaton or John Candy in the Phoenix role and Macaulay Culkin as the kid…only it’d be better because Candy was awesome and greatly missed. It also leaves poor Hoffmann with little choice but to literally phone in a good chunk of her performance. She’s good, as is a very credible Scoot McNairy in a fairy thankless role, but they and the two leads aren’t enough to elevate the dull material.

 

A sweet uncle-and-nephew film that doesn’t add up to very much at all and distracts you with some of its stylistic and narrative choices. Well-acted, but so what? Too safe and clichéd to be so pretentious and arty. I didn’t get this, I’m completely at a loss to explain the almost universal praise from the few who seem to have seen it. Have the people who praised this never seen “Kramer vs. Kramer” or something?

Rating: C-