C’mon C’mon
A24When it comes to capturing family dynamics and dysfunction, it is hard to find many modern filmmakers who have proved to be as solid as Mike Mills. Coming from a career in the music video industry, Mills has quickly gained attention and respect leading to the release of his newest feature C'mon C'mon. Following a friendship that forms between a young boy named Jesse (Woody Norman) and his uncle Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) who watches Jesse as his mom Viv (Gaby Hoffmann) helps his father Paul (Scoot McNairy) overcome a number of personal demons he is fighting. Clearly serving as Mills' exploration into the complexities of the childhood mind, C'mon C'mon is a somewhat frustrating and undeniably uneven feature that attempts to blend reality with fiction to disappointing results.
The world of C'mon C'mon confusion defines itself by an inadvertent dichotomy of truths. The film opens with footage of Joaquin Phoenix interviewing real kids about their thoughts on the world around them and their own personal slice of the human experience. Consistently throughout the film, the feature goes back to these scenes which offer a wonderfully authentic look at the adolescent mind. Hearing real kids give real answers that often feel all too wise and poignant for someone their age stands tall as the clear highlight of the feature. Sadly, these segments are not the focus of the film. While it is entirely possible to have quirky characters give stylised performances and find a root of realised poignance through that to the extremes of a project like Swiss Army Man, to inject this fantasy with something real and claim them to be equal is a clear miscalculation.
No one can say that Woody Norman is giving a bad performance in the feature, but he is clearly giving the wrong performance. Mills gives him quirky dialogue that reads as incredibly mature and unnatural for the age of the performer and character. Joaquin Phoenix similarly gives a thoughtful and quiet meditative performance striking back to the work he gave in Her. These performances are good, but they are clearly crafted and forced. This would not be an issue if the film continually did not break the illusion of its fictional world by cutting to the real kids giving real interviews but as is, it clearly trivialises and weakens the fictional content of the film.
It also doesn't help that the film simply struggles at times to find a purpose or direction. The relationship between Jesse and Johnny develops but never finds evolution or breakthrough. The story sits stale and decides to repeat its main emotions and ideas hoping to find something worthwhile along the way. While these emotions never fall completely flat, the viewing experience does grow tiring after 108-minutes and by the end it feels hard to recall anything the film truly taught or found that was new or that important. It feels rather clear that the better path towards this successful conclusion would be for the film to simply be 90-minutes of Phoenix traveling the country and interviewing the real-life kids he encounters but as is, the film feels sadly shallow.
While narratively, C'mon C'mon leaves plenty to be desired, one can not take away the technical ability of the film. The black and white camera work from Robbie Ryan is stunning, with the focus often putting close intimate moments of human interaction against large shots of the city which feels visually overwhelming in the best of ways. The sound design featured in the film is also incredibly proficient with the film using the audio of everyday life in an artistic sense that feels ambient and fresh. Throughout his career, Mills has impressed wonderfully, finding the beauty and art within the modern everyday world; C'mon C'mon feels no different.
C'mon C'mon is a film that comes incredibly close to being something special only to ultimately dig its own grave with misguided choices and direction. The film pits reality and fantasy together and chooses fantasy to be the focus when the reality was clearly the more interesting and worthwhile path. At the end of the day, the film simply feels uninteresting and unrewarding which stands as incredibly disappointing considering the power and craft of Mills' previous projects.
