Kajillionaire (2020) - Movie Review

A movie by Miranda July. The first movie on Richard Brody's 36 Top 2020 Movies. 

The first movie on the list and the one that I most anticipated. I watched the trailer before it came out and I was just hooked immediately. The movie tells about a family of 3, the daughter, Old Dolio Dyne portrayed by Evan Rachel Wood, the dad–Richard Jenkins, and the mother – Debra Winger. As a family, their dynamics more like partners in crime rather not unusually portrayed in films. The Dynes basically live on coupons, eat leftovers and scavenging. Their home is an office whose walls occasionally leaked pink foams rented to them by a man work in a factory.

The movie opens with a heist in a post-office. Old Dolio rolling around the front of the post office, entering the crime scene, and taking mails and looking for the items in it that can be turned into money. Earlier, I mentioned that the Dynes rented an office to be their home and the fact that they haven’t paid their due bill for the rented office, they become somehow more desperate to look for scamming gigs. Eventually, the Old Dolio plan a fraud to claim lost baggage that acquires them to fly to New York and then flight back act like total strangers. On the flight back, they and by means the dad and the mom, met Melanie (played by Gina Rodriguez). Melanie is a young woman that soon will become a ripple to their peace-stable kind of life. I don’t even know if that can even be called a peaceful life but they have their own kind of peaceful life.

 

I’m not going to spoil what happens but there is something so raw in the Old Dolio character. I named it a character that has a mental of a fetus, I don’t know why, but I did name her character that. So, she took a gig that offers to her, the job is to come to a parenthood lesson session. The session is teaching the parents in the room about breast crawl. I won’t bother explaining that, you can just google it. And that session struck Old Dolio in the gut and touched her inner self. It kinda makes her question her mom’s love for her. There’s a scene on the plane flight to New York, there’s turbulence occurred, and it was just like a near-death experience for three of them, and she asks her mom if she breast crawl or she was put in a crib when she was a baby. It’s just wow. I realized how much she gives her parents the benefit of the doubt that they love her (spoiler alert, they don’t!).

 

There is also another scene I love that makes me over-analyze it. So, she basically going on a mission with Melanie to check one of the things in a list that her parent never does for/to her. She and Melanie entering a dark room. And then the tremor starts happening. So basically she becomes paranoid and said things she never meant. Then, they exit the room when it stopped and they fought (well, Melanie is mad at Old Dolio). And Old Dolio kinda just crawl at a gas station since it was their intention to go to the dark room in the first place. And that’s just break me. From that scene, the analogy for it is every baby are seeing constant darkness in the womb and eventually they’ll see light when we fought to come out, so the darkroom is an analogy for a womb. The tremor is the constant bump that we fetus feel when we were in the womb.

The last thing is, the one thing that made me compelled and committed to watching this movie is the soundtrack. It's Mr. Lonely that originally sang by Bobby Vinton. In the movie, the version that they choose to use is Bobby Vinton version but they also asked singer-songwriter, Angel Olsen, to do a cover for this one and it is beautiful. You can listen to it on youtube or Spotify. 

In an interview with Miranda July, in The New Yorker Radio Hour, the interviewer mentioned that Miranda July's work usually finds people who tend to enjoy comedy but this movie of her is telling both comedy and a tragedy. And I have to agree because despite me enjoying this great movie, there is some scene that I can't help feeling weirdly uncomfortable. This is a movie about when-you-think-that-is-funny-but-if-you-laugh-it-feels-like-you-don't-have-any-empathy kind of movie. A 5-stars for me.