C’mon C’mon [2021]
“Have you ever thought about the future?”
Celebrated writer/ director, Mike Mills, reenters the feature length stage five years after his Oscar nominated 20th Century Women with his take on the “wise beyond their years” trope. Featuring an excellently subtle Joaquin Phoenix and a truly astonishing child performance by Woody Norman, C’mon C’mon is good. But is it great?
We follow radio documentarian, Johnny [Phoenix], as he takes on the burden of watching his nephew, Jesse [Norman], during a family crisis. Through their time together, Johnny learns more about himself than he intended, and begins to heal wounds that have separated him from the person who means the most in his life, his sister. It’s sweet, it’s moving, it’s profound in flashing moments, and… It’s a bit tired.
If you’ve seen one of these films, you’ve seen them all. A slightly-to-very cynical adult gets strapped with a kid who’s screwball energy at first drives them insane, and then unlocks something hidden deep inside of them; both people parting better for the interaction. They will fight, they will make up, the kid will almost certainly disappear momentarily which will cause the adult to panic, and at some point they will resort to screaming at trees/ the sky to vent their frustration, culminating in the two of them being closer than ever. It’s not that there’s any issue with this formula, it’s just that it is just that: A formula.
C’mon C’mon isn’t bad in any imaginable way. The problem is that it isn’t exactly memorable either. Apart from the artistic decision to make the film black-and-white [which, strangely, I found to be quite distracting] and a moving passage about what it means to live on planet Earth, C’mon just doesn’t have much new to offer. It’s sweet enough, and moving enough, but “enough” just isn’t enough in a sea otherwise filled with things just like you. C’mon C’mon is a film perfectly at home on the tiny plastic TV your parents had in their kitchen; the one that always seemed to have the news running even when nobody was around, as though the replacement of the radio just hadn’t quite settled in yet.
The biggest issue with these films is their tendency to feel like one of those posts you see on social media about a child that says something profound that floors a nearby adult:
Watched The Croods with my 8-yo nephew
Me: When do you think this is set?
Nephew: In the future when society has broken down.
WOAH
You know they didn’t say that, they know they didn’t say that, so why does anyone bother? I’d say that C’mon might fall into this trap a little more than others, but not so egregious as to be damning; just noticeable. While I think there's an interpretation to be had that the film we see is Johnny's recollection/ recording of events for Jesse, I also don't know that it fixes this problem... I also am not sure that it matters. And I think that’s my major issue with the film at large.
It’s just kind of… Fine. It starts, it has a middle, you're almost sad, and then it ends. While C'mon C'mon does feature some of the best dialogue on how children internalize/ struggle to express trauma, anxiety, and feelings in general that I've maybe ever seen in film, that mostly happens over the course of a single scene, and then is never revisited. There was an opportunity here to shift our focus away from Johnny and surprise the viewer with a message about how important crafting the future is, but, instead, we took a more linear path and were left with a more forgettable experience.
This could have really been something. Instead, we're just left with some thing.
“Sit down and close your eyes and try to find yourself - because I feel like that's what you really have to do to know what you want.”
