C’mon C’mon (2021 | USA | 108 minutes | Mike Mills)
Toward the end of C’mon C’mon Joaquin Phoenix’s uncle Johnny asks his nephew: “Are you laughing or are you crying? I can’t tell.” As is the case with most of his filmography, viewers of Mike Mills’s brilliant new film would almost certainly answer with a very enthusiastic “both”.
In it, Joaquin Phoenix plays a public radio journalist who is in the midst of a tour of around the country in which he and his small crew conduct freeform interviews with kids for their thoughts on the future. Middle aged, single, and maybe a little emotionally reserved, he’s not the most obvious choice to watch his ten-year-old nephew Jesse (a phenomenal Woody Norman) on short notice. But, despite their past estrangement, his sister Viv (Gaby Hoffmann) is shorthanded for help when she has to leave town on short notice to help her increasingly unstable ex (Jesse’s father, Scoot McNairy) to navigate an emerging mental health crisis.
Johnny barely knows Jesse, but with telephone coaching from his mom, they forge a tenuous bond over walks on the beach, learning about recording equipment, and accommodating some of the the kid’s weird habits and penchant for orphan role play. When Viv’s rescue mission turns out to require more than a few days to resolve, Johnny winds up taking Jesse back to New York City with him and later, reluctantly, allows him to tag along to New Orleans while he completes his project. What begins as a long weekend of unprepared babysitting in Los Angeles eventually develops into weeks of on-the-job training in surrogate parenthood and shaky personal growth.
The film marks a long-overdue opportunity for Phoenix to show his softer, shaggier side. Despite being largely separated from Gabby Hoffman, the two actors convincingly play off each other as distanced siblings who have hurt each other, yet still love each other deeply. Mills allows the source of their tension to be revealed in quick fragments and eventually addressed through frank conversations in which both actors shine. While that relationship is organically developed, we also get to watch his growing rapport with Jesse. Child acting can be tricky, particularly when the kid is meant to be especially precocious, but Phoenix and Norman (who’s actually British!) are such a disarming pair that they forge a natural connection. The depth of their growing relationship — through adoring, anxious, and frustrating fits and starts — is palpable and utterly affecting to watch.
Shot in luminous black-and-white, which Mills described as a gesture toward creating a myth and evoking the crisp lines of a drawing, each setting has its own look, feel, and soundscape. Beyond allowing each city to act as a character for the actors to play against, Mills’s style of “heterogeneous filmmaking” incorporates real documentary-style interviews with children. Their candid comments about themselves, their diagnoses of issues with current events, and their predictions for the future are authentic, cautionary, and enlightening. As the main plot moves forward, phone calls, text messages, and flashbacks between siblings reveal the complicated familial landscape that resulted in their currently distant relationship. Also woven throughout the movie are direct quotes from essays and readings of heart-tugging children’s stories.
In anyone else’s hands, all of these threads could quickly become a tangled trying-too-hard mess. But Mills allows them to each to run complementary courses, and the cumulative effect creates tingling electric resonances that are much more than the sum of their parts. It’s an astonishing gestalt about the ways that people take care of each other all the time. By the end, we’re so invested in Jesse and Johnny that a few notes of encouragement and a promise for the future had almost everyone crying into their face masks.
C’mon C’mon arrives in local theaters — including the recently re-opened SIFF Egyptian! — this evening. I saw it over Labor Day Weekend at Telluride (when a version of this review originally ran) and I’m still think about it all the time.
(Header image courtesy of A24)