From the limitless and seemingly bewildered imagination of John Krasinski comes YEAH (now streaming on VOD services like Prime Video), all in caps, because it’s an acronym for “imaginary friend.” The actor-turned-director continues his two successful A peaceful place movies with a drastically different tenor: a family comedy-drama about a sad 12-year-old girl who finds herself dating a collection of computer-animated IFs, and also Ryan Reynolds, for somewhat baffling reasons. You may be realizing that this film is a bit of a puzzler, an oddity that had trouble finding an audience in theaters (it has grossed $174 million worldwide), because it’s something Krasinski apparently wanted to make for everyone, with voice cameos from every famous person he could get, it seemed, but it ended up going to no one.
YEAH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: We open with a mega-annoying montage: Memories of happy times between Bea (Cailey Fleming) and her mom (Catharine Daddario) and dad (Krasinski). Lots of fantasy, playtime, drawing, painting, building blanket forts and dancing to Tina Turner, and then, oh no, Mom wears a rag to the hospital. A few years pass. Bea is now 12 years old and is back in the same apartment we saw in the montage, which, after rebuilding everything, belongs to her grandmother (Fiona Shaw), who lives in Brooklyn and allowed them to stay there while Bea’s mother was away. . in treatment. Except this time, Mom’s gone and Dad’s in the hospital, awaiting a mysterious surgery, and all this vagueness would make sense if Bea was, say, six or seven, and struggling to understand this ordeal, but she’s 12. years and should. She will already be fully on board the Melancholy Deep Sigh train of life, especially after the hard lessons of losing her mother. Bea visits dad in the hospital and he is very happy and optimistic because he is trying not to worry his daughter. HELLO NBD! is the implicit message of everything he says and does, and for all his nonsense, he acts as if he could outdo Patch Adams himself. That is, we have to resist the temptation to punch him.
One night, Bea is watching Harvey with his grandmother, because that’s what people tend to do in movies about imaginary friends. Grandma falls asleep and Bea stays away from her for a long time, which happens often (Grandma must be quite liberal in raising her), but if she didn’t, she imagines how boring her life would be. she. Anyway, Bea ends up meeting a strange animation named Blossom (voice of Phoebe Waller-Bridge), an insect-like being that looks like something out of an old black-and-white Disney cartoon. Blossom lives in a neighboring apartment with Blue (voice of Steve Carell), a giant fluff bomb who is part Purple Snorklewacker and part Sully from Monsters Inc. They are IFs (imaginary friends) who have been abandoned by the children who created them. Or maybe “forgotten” is a better word? Either way, it’s depressing in the way that the toy story The movies were depressing because they were about children growing up and replacing the fun, silly things of youth with the less fun and serious things of adolescence and adulthood.
Anyway, Blossom and Blue are in the care of Cal (Reynolds), a gentleman in suspenders whose purpose isn’t entirely clear, though we’re starting to get the distinct whiff of a third-act reveal here. Cal takes Bea to Coney Island, where there’s a secret retirement home for the lost, forgotten, abandoned, discarded, missing (are you crying yet?) IFs of the world. There’s a talking bear in a hat (Louis Gossett Jr), a unicorn (Emily Blunt), a gummy bear (Amy Schumer), an astronaut (George Clooney), a smiling sunflower (Matt Damon), a googly-eyed bubble. (Awkwafina), a gob of slime (Keegan-Michael Key), a talking ice cube in a glass of water (Bradley Cooper); I could go on, because this is like a game of Can you recognize a celebrity’s voice? .
Bea feels sad about the plight of the FIs, some of whom discuss their abandonment issues in a totally hilarious group therapy sequence. She takes it upon herself to try to match them with new children, for example, the super precocious boy with a broken leg, arm and tailbone that she meets in the hospital while she visits her father. There are some rules about how this works, but I do know what they are; The Precocious Child cannot see IFs, and neither can others, especially adults, who are too old to recognize anthropomorphic manifestations of fantasy. But she has to be careful not to be considered crazy: there’s a shot of her hugging Blue, and all a passerby sees is Bea floating in the air. Meanwhile, Cal is upset about everything. What the hell is he doing here, anyway? Anyway, consider that the plot established here is too deep in the film than it should be. Like 45 minutes, maybe more. It’s almost half of the movie. What have we been doing all this time? Well, we’ve been gutting it, while the movie does nonsense. Urgent, it is not; Restless, you surely are.
What movies will it remind you of?: The opening sequence is copied from Above. The concept has the vibe of dad Krasinski trying to make a movie for his kids, something like Robert Rodríguez did with Sharkboy and Lavagirl (which was much less visible than this). The film seems to want to be in the vein of a live-action and animated masterpiece. Who killed Roger Rabbit?, but much less fun. And the toy storyWe did all this much more effectively.
Performance worth seeing: Fleming is a winning presence in this film, despite not quite knowing what to do with this tonally and conceptually messy material.
Memorable dialogue: SAD TROMBONE: “You don’t have to treat me like a child,” Bea tells her dad. “Life doesn’t always have to be fun.”
Sex and skin: None.
Our opinion: Krasinski clearly wants feel things: longing, regret, nostalgia, melancholy, longing, fantasy… all things rooted in the all-too-adult sense that the carefree joys of childhood are fleeting, that innocence always inevitably evaporates into the ether, to be grasped to her. longingly, but never fully embraced again. Are you discouraged yet? You should be. This is a maudlin movie presented with the trappings of a cute children’s movie. What did I feel throughout the film? Strange. I felt strange. It’s like this movie is trying hard but it just doesn’t work in a weird way.
Which is not to say that the central idea lacks potential: for adults, imaginary friends are symbols of the childhood purity that we no longer have, but that we long for in bittersweet reminiscences. But the idea fails badly in the context of a pseudo-intelligent fairy tale presented to the entire family (read: the audience Pixar is targeting so well). Krasinski aspires to timelessness (YEAH It’s apparently set in the ’90s, before smartphones, because that ruined thing eachthing), and winking an eye falls into Harvey and Calvin and Hobbes references, hoping to draw on some pop culture touchstones. But the pacing is slow, the performances are more curious than engaging (Reynolds and Fleming sometimes seem lost), the lack of specificity lowers the stakes (what is Bea’s father’s ailment, anyway?), and by In the final stretch, Krasinski pulls at our cockles without properly heating them first, leaving one feeling angry and manipulated. YEAH Ultimately, it illustrates how Krasinski has some cinematic acumen and good, original ideas, but he still doesn’t know enough about cockles to try to whip them up. Be careful with the cockles, brother. They are delicate.
Our call: I wish I could make a joke about “IF actually means Okay,” but I can’t, because it doesn’t. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic living in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
