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It’s easy to look cynically at Braff’s crowd-funded follow up to his modest 2004 hit Garden State, but the film itself is an affecting film, an urgent plea for intimacy and humanity directed at a generation so self-obsessed and technologically connected that neither of those two things come naturally.
The result is a charming film which, while not without its flaws, is one of the most eminently watchable films of 2014 and one that will likely find itself in heavy rotation for fans of Braff’s.
Make no mistake: it doesn’t take you by surprise and knock you on your ass the way Garden State did, but Wish I Was Here is Braff’s best work, and you can see his fingerprints throughout; much of the film echoes what he did best on Scrubs, juxtaposing broad comedy with life-and-death stakes.
Mandy Patinkin of The Princess Bride plays Gabe, the father of both Aidan (Braff) and his brother Noah, played by Josh Gad; he’s the stabilizing factor in Aidan’s life because, in spite of a somewhat tense relationship, he pays for private education for Aidan’s two children in an attempt to indoctrinate them into Judaism in a way he failed to do with his own sons. This financial support frees Aidan to pursue his dream as an actor — something we see primarily through the lens of a number of failed auditions wherein he and another actor played by The Big Bang Theory‘s Jim Parsons always find themselves auditioning against one another only to lose out to a revolving cast of third parties.
And so Gabe’s health problems not only force Aidan to face the reality of losing his father, but his safety net as he has to homeschool his kids — a daughter who’s too smart to learn anything from him and a son who’s too hyperactive to try.
From this premise flows about two hours of soul-searching as Aidan becomes a better person and a more likable character seemingly without ever really setting out to do so.
It’s a staple of cinema — especially comedy — that wide-eyed free spirits like Aidan are often the ones who are perceived to be “right,” while their judgmental parents and stressed-out wives are relegated to “they just don’t get it” or worse. Wish I Was Here boldly subverts that and gives us a lead character who is endlessly frustrating and supporting players that make you want to shake Braff’s character by the ears.
Feminist critiques of film often look to characters like the one played by Hudson and complain that they’re always a wet blanket ruining the lead character’s fun. If there’s a fault with Hudson’s character, it’s the opposite. She’s so supportive, so kind and so consistently right throughout the film that she is a little unbelievable. Still, a key scene between she and Patinkin serves as the emotional core of the film and cements her as the most likable part of the movie.
Patinkin, too, is great, although he takes longer to grow on the viewer. His irascible personality is something that he clings to as the life slips out of him, only really calming down when confronted with the reality that the way he acts in his last days will materially affect the family that he’s always loved in his own somewhat quiet and detached way.
It doesn’t feel mean-spirited on Braff’s part. As the writer and director of the film, you never get the impression that he’s talking down to the Comic Con crowd (he actually filmed at the show last year); rather, Braff as an outsider with a lot of eyes into the comics scene (he’s off-camera friends with Parsons as well as Kick-Ass 2‘s Donald Faison, who makes a brief appearance in Wish I Was Here as well), seems captivated by the sense of wonder and the fantastic that cosplay and Comic Con offer and while his view of the culture is somewhat simplistic, it isn’t derisive. Certainly his agorophobic, video game-addicted brother is more socially functional and well-rounded than most characters on The Big Bang Theory.
So while it’s easy to watch that part of the film — the bit that got us thinking and writing about the movie in the first place — with a half-eyeroll and a kind of detached amusement, the material surrounding it so so strong, sincere and heartfelt that it doesn’t feel as stock or manipulative as it would in many other films. It’s like, he doesn’t “get” Comic Con…but he’s trying, and the only reason it really sticks out at all is that the rest of the film is so genuine.
The bottom line: Braff’s second directorial feature has a few moments where it lags — the result, perhaps, of a vanity project in the age of digital stock where the cost of film prints aren’t a factor and there’s nobody there to tell you to knock it off. Still, it leaves the impressive Garden State in the dust in terms of both ambition and execution. The stellar performances of the cast carry the weight of a somewhat predictable (albeit fulfilling) script. A-
