Friday new releases: 17 May 2024

IF, The Way, My Way and Joika are in cinemas.

There’s usu­ally an unspoken con­tract between the view­er and a movie and it’s when that con­tract gets broken that some­thing inter­est­ing happens.

I’ll give you an example.

The trail­er for John Krasinski’s IF prom­ises a wacky Ryan Reynolds com­edy, full of his usu­al dead­pan wise­cracks along­side some amus­ing CGI creatures. The con­tract with me, there­fore, was that I was going to hate it and – when it looked as if time was going to be too tight to see everything, IF was very nearly the film that fell by the wayside.

Well, friends, I’m glad it didn’t because the actu­al film went ahead and broke that con­tract by being quite good and even – sur­pris­ingly for a story about children’s ima­gin­ary friends – quite grown-up.

Even Reynolds dials down his reg­u­lar per­sona and the film’s ingra­ti­at­ing joc­u­lar­ity – all of it squeezed into that trail­er – works much bet­ter when it is spaced out a bit.

Cailey Fleming plays 12-year-old Bea, sent to live with her grand­moth­er in Brooklyn while her fath­er (writer-director John Krasinski) recov­ers from the recent death of Bea’s mother.

Determined to be as grown-up as pos­sible, Bea is sur­prised to find that she can see Blue, a giant purple fluffy mon­ster (voiced by Steve Carell) who lives in the apart­ment upstairs with kind-hearted Cal (Reynolds). Blue was once someone’s ima­gin­ary friend but when the child gets too old, they for­get them. Cal’s mis­sion is to find new chil­dren for these orphaned IFs and, reluct­antly, he enlists Bea to help.

The idea that adults lose some­thing spe­cial when they grow up and that ima­gin­a­tion and play are import­ant to us all, is not par­tic­u­larly nov­el. Indeed, Krasinski drops evid­ence of what you might call ‘pri­or art’ all over the place.

What I was not expect­ing was the air of mel­an­choly that hov­ers over the film – I don’t think kids are going to be the audi­ence that gets the most out of it. 

If you go and see IF this week­end, do stay to the end of the cred­its. Not because there are any hints about an IF 2 or any­thing like that, there’s just a lovely trib­ute to one of the seni­or cast mem­bers, Louis Gossett Jr.

The con­tract that an audi­ence has with films about the pil­grim­age of the Camino de Santiago is that the pil­grims will fin­ish the trip spir­itu­ally enriched or trans­formed in some way, at least that’s my understanding.

So it was some­what dis­ap­point­ing that in Bill Bennett’s auto­bi­o­graph­ic­al The Way, My Way, “Bill” exper­i­ences very little in the way of growth. Indeed, the res­ult of the hun­dreds of kilo­metres that he walks is that he becomes slightly less dis­agree­able to his walk­ing com­pan­ions and slightly more accept­able to his long suf­fer­ing wife (played by Bennett’s real-life wife Jennifer Cluff). The oper­at­ive part of the film’s title is “My Way” not “The Way”, after all.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

That’s not to say that the film is a waste of time. Chris Haywood as the mostly incuri­ous Bill is a watch­able stand-in for the real thing but he’s argu­ably the least inter­est­ing char­ac­ter in it. Go for the beau­ti­ful land­scapes and to ima­gine what it might be like to spend all that time med­it­at­ing on your tiny place in the great divine firmament.

New New Zealand-Polish co-production Joika also breaks the anti­cip­ated con­tract between film and audi­ence but it feels like a delib­er­ate choice by the filmmakers.

Based on the true story of – and made with the par­ti­cip­a­tion and approv­al of – bal­let star Joy Womack, I think the inten­tion of the script is to show how it is pos­sible through will­power and strength of char­ac­ter to over­come all kinds of adversity and even­tu­ally live your dreams.

Except that the way this story is told – by The Dark Horse writer-director James Napier Robertson – con­tra­dicts the script’s mes­sage and tells you that this way of liv­ing, this way of think­ing, is a kind of night­mare and not a healthy way to be at all!

Womack stud­ied Russian-style bal­let as a child in Texas and won a place at the pres­ti­gi­ous Bolshoi Academy in Moscow where she was determ­ined to gradu­ate into a prima baller­ina role at the Bolshoi itself. No American had ever done such a thing and Womack’s single-minded ambi­tion takes in sab­ot­age, injury and even an unlikely mar­riage in order to achieve it.

Anyway, the real Womack is evid­ently some­thing of a legend in the bal­let world – for self-promotion if not for her dan­cing – and I’m sure the lot­tery tick­et buy­ers of New Zealand are thrilled that they get to play a part in burn­ish­ing that legend.