A vanity project if there ever was one, Zach Braff’s Wish
You Were Here is far too calculated to take seriously and suffers from a sense
of earnestness that’s so overbearing that the film ends up pushing us away
rather than drawing us in. All of the
blame rests on Braff’s shoulders as he not only stars in the film but directed
and wrote it as well with his brother Adam.
This project first made headlines when Braff began a Kickstarter
campaign to produce it and raised over $3 million to do so, proving once more
that W.C. Fields’ comment about a sucker being born every minute is as true now
as it was when he first made this observation.
While I have no facts to back this up, I wouldn’t be surprised if this
grassroots effort was necessary because the filmmaker couldn’t get financing
any other way.
A poster boy for Peter Pan Syndrome, Aidan Bloom (Braff) is
a man-child stuck at a crossroads. 35
years old and getting nowhere as an actor, his much-too-understanding wife
Sarah (Kate Hudson, better than she has been in years) supports him and his two
children Grace (Joey King) and Tucker (Pierce Gagnon). However, Aidan is forced to come to terms
with grown-up concerns when he’s told by his father Gabe (Mandy Patinkin) that
he is dying and will no longer be able to pay the tuition for the kid’s private
schooling. Realizing that desperate
times call for desperate measures, Aiden decides he will homeschool his
children, while continuing to go to auditions and tend to his father when he
can.
Braff is far too self-conscious an actor to give a solid,
well-rounded performance. As a result,
Aidan is someone we simply can’t connect with, what with being so distracted by
the performer’s “Hey, look at me” turn.
As his brother Noah, Josh Gad gets sucked into this maelstrom of
mugging, exaggerating his character’s quirky qualities past the point of
parody, creating a caricature that’s far more irritating than poignant. Inexplicably, two actors who usually do all
they can to steal the spotlight, Hudson and Patinkin, give solid performances
that end up having us sympathize with Sarah and Gabe for having to deal with
these albatrosses that have been tied around their necks. They both underplay to good effect, seasoned
enough to know that a quiet line reading and a well-placed pause can be far
more effective than any theatrical grandstanding.
As with most movies, its biggest fault lies in its foundation,
as the Braffs’ script is predictable from the first. Where there is a long-standing feud between
father and son there’s sure to be a deathbed reconciliation; when Noah’s
out-of-his-league neighbor (Ashley Greene) approaches him in a passive
aggressive manner, you can bet they’ll end up between the sheets in the end and
when Sarah is harassed by a co-worker, you just know that in the end he’ll get
his comeuppance from Aiden. These
situations and their denouements arise in the most improbable manner and one’s
left wishing that things played out in real life as perfectly as they do in the
Braffs’ perfect world.
There are numerous reasons why Wish I Was Here left a bad
taste in my mouth, not the least being the way in which each of the Blooms’
dire conflicts were resolved in a too-good-to-be-true manner. Braff’s cloying approach creates a tone of
neediness that’s so uncomfortable that if the film were an acquaintance you’d
delete it from your phone’s contact list and block it on Facebook. I don’t go to the movies to be accosted, I go
to be entertained and prompted to think, two things Wish fails to do on both
counts.
This article appears in Jul 24-30, 2014.
