His central character is the kind of guy for whom everything happens. He has not discernible special qualities, he's pretty average in every way, but that doesn't stop the world stopping for him. He is a teenager of modest means who is also somehow an actor going on tour around the world, somehow able to start a waterbed business and then a pinball business, and for some reason women (both young and old) throw themselves at him. I get that PTA is imagining the world he wants, or maybe that he had to a certain degree as a white kid growing up in southern California, but it little of it has an air of reality to it.
The film opens with him winning over a woman 10 years older than him while he is ON HIS HIGHSCHOOL CAMPUS. I actually don't have as much of an issue with the age gap things as many do. This is, as I've said, a straight kid fantasy film, it is the gaze of the young man, but I never once believed she would fall for him yet from the first moments she is putty in his hands despite everything she tells herself to resist.
The film then progresses through a series of rather episodic vignettes which rarely feel realistic from an absurd encounter with Barbara Streisand's violent and narcissistic boyfriend, a nightmarish date with Sean Penn playing a lecherous actor, a cringey racist restaurant owner, and an out of place sequence featuring a closeted politician played by director Benjamin Safdie. Little of it feels connected to each other, the characters often feel separated from how they were in different scenes. It often feels like PTA just wants to put someone in his movie so he writes a scene for them that isn't organic. And with Haim's family playing her character's family much of the film feels overly meta.
Perhaps that's part of the problem for me. The film feels less like a story being told to me and more like an exorcize in references to other things. The central characters are played by actors whose real world relationships take us out of the movie and they keep interacting with other take us out of the movie cameos. I never felt there was a story being told here... at least not one I could buy into. By the end when the fantasy is fulfilled and the boy gets the woman none of it felt earned.
I kept thinking in my head maybe the film isn't trying to make this a "romance" film but is trying to comment on how unhealthy the relationship is but I could never find evidence of that within the film itself. I mean it felt very much like a teen boy's fantasy about an older woman he really has not hope with shoehorning the ending he wants into the story. But for all the film's meta-ness it never seemed self aware enough to be making any comment on that besides just letting it happen. And while that might be a story other's find entertaining it just doesn't speak to me.
Starring: Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Bradley Cooper, Benjamin Safdie, Skyler Gisondo, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, John Michael Higgins, Christine Ebersole, Harriet Samsom Harris, Maya Rudolph, George C. Reilly
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