Artist and filmmaker Miranda July is many things — offbeat, iconoclastic, absurd — but one thing she is not is prolific. Following her classic calling card Me And You And Everyone We Know in 2005, it took her six years to follow up with The Future and now a further nine years to deliver Kajillionaire. But happily, it’s worth the wait. July’s stock-in-trade are perfectly observed, beautifully crafted miniatures of characters who live on the fringes and have little truck with normalcy, broken people often filled with a sense of longing. Kajillionaire brilliantly hits all of those touchstones, but this time within the framework of a traditionally male-dominated genre.
Because, for an hour or so, Kajillionaire is Miranda July’s take on a con movie, a kind of ‘Ocean’s Three’ in bad clothing. The Dynes are a family of ramshackle grifters — dad Robert (Richard Jenkins), mom Theresa (Debra Winger) and daughter Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood) — whose scams are decidedly small-scale: robbing a post-office safe-deposit box that scores a tie (Wood gets to indulge in some hilarious cat-burglar moves); returning gift certificates for dosh; Old Dolio pretending to be pregnant and taking part in a ‘positive parenting’ class for cash. An impetus to get more ambitious comes when they owe their weird-voiced landlord (Mark Ivanir) $1,500 in rent to stay in an empty office-style space where the walls are constantly flooded with pink, soapy suds that have to be collected in buckets (this might be Peak Miranda July). So, after winning a trip to New York in a comp, Old Dolio — the explanation for her strange name is genius — comes up with a scheme to blag airline insurance (to the tune of $1,500) via some bogus lost luggage. While the grift doesn’t go exactly to plan, it does bring chatty, extrovert Melanie (Gina Rodriguez) into their orbit.
This is perhaps Evan Rachel Wood’s best performance on film.
It’s at this point that Kajillionaire changes tack. Ushered into the gang, Melanie invites them on a scam where they inveigle their way into the lives of OAPs in order to pick up objects to flog, but they are caught off guard when they come across a lonely old man, clearly dying, and begin to act like a normal family to cheer him along (no, actually, this is Peak Miranda July). Melanie holds up a mirror to the oddball clan, especially opening up Old Dolio to the kind of familial warmth and kindness she has never been given.
How this all plays out is surprising, human and tender. This is perhaps Wood’s best performance on film, playing a low-energy girl hiding behind a monotone voice and straight, long hair who gradually finds a way to be vulnerable. And Rodriguez is a revelation, breathing life into the moribund family unit but revealing hidden depths beneath the cheery bluster. Their relationship is a mark of the journey July take us on. It’s a flick that starts with a con. And ends with a connection.
