Johnny, who has no children (and no partner-Jesse makes sure to ask him why not), has suddenly taken on responsibilities for which he has little training. Johnny has to get back to New York for some scheduled interviews, so he takes Jesse with him-and, when Viv extends her stay again, Johnny brings Jesse along on a road trip to New Orleans for more interviews, which both challenges and deepens the tightening bond between nephew and uncle. Then Paul takes a turn for the worse, and Viv needs to prolong her stay in Oakland. Johnny unhesitatingly volunteers to drop everything he flies to Los Angeles to move into Viv’s house for a few days and look after her nine-year-old son, Jesse (Woody Norman), whom he doesn’t know well. He has moved to Oakland but is experiencing a bout of mental illness and needs Viv to care for him there. But now Viv has other news: her husband, Paul (Scoot McNairy), who works in the classical-music world, has taken a job in San Francisco. It’s apparent that this is the first time the siblings have spoken since then there seems to be some lasting bitterness over what went on in her last days. The action is sparked by a phone call: from the solitude of his hotel room, Johnny calls his sister Viv (Gaby Hoffmann), a writer and professor in Los Angeles, on the occasion of the first anniversary of their mother’s death. (The movie starts with the voices of these children on the soundtrack.) Johnny records the interviews himself, travelling with bulky, old-school audio equipment, and, at the end of the day, he holes up in his hotel room, listening to the recordings and then using the same machine as a vocal notepad, speaking into the microphone to record his jottings and musings for how to frame and introduce the interviews. The movie begins with him in Detroit, where he’s at work on a long-term project involving interviews with young people-kids, near-adolescents, teen-agers-about their lives and their expectations of the future. The protagonist, Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix), is a New York-based radio producer and on-air personality. What’s more, it brings not only its characters but its cast of actors into the cinematic maelstrom of inner life, and thus offers an extraordinary showcase for their artistry. The result is a film of an extraordinary amplitude it’s both poised and frenetic, contemplative and active, heartily sentimental and astringently contentious, intensively intimate and expansively world-embracing, exactingly composed and wildly spontaneous. “C’mon C’mon” is a tender and turbulent melodrama that amplifies its power with a documentary current. He makes the movie’s soundtrack-and emotional life-complex by making the drama complex in form. In his new film, “C’mon C’mon” (which opens Friday in theatres), Mike Mills comes up with an inventive and deeply affecting way to bring his characters’ teeming reflections and memories to the fore. Yet the artifice of voice-overs, too, risks falling into convention. Even many of the greatest films lapse into this unquestioned habit, fixating on the dialogue of outward action in lieu of the relentless flow of characters’ internal monologues. For the most part, the recording of sound has been used shockingly unimaginatively, to transform movies into something close to filmed plays. Indeed, the movie is so much like tangled, beautiful memories that it may be difficult to recall the movie in order.The crucial question of talking pictures has always been what to do with the soundtrack, and few filmmakers have done much with it. (Johnny's personal journals also provide breaks.) The excellent performances - including those by Norman and Hoffman - and Mills' fearless devotion to honesty give C'mon C'mon a life pulse. Johnny recaps and analyzes things in lovely phone calls to his sister, and then each little "chapter" is capped with a reading from some kind of nonfiction essay. There's nothing to do but go moment by moment, as Jesse asks pointed questions, throws tantrums, runs off, plays lovingly, cuddles, and imagines. In an early scene, Jesse talks about "fungus tubes" that connect everything in nature, and that's a decent metaphor for the movie. Johnny (Phoenix gives his tenderest, most open-hearted performance since Her) coaxes moving answers from the children he interviews, but how to apply that information to life? And how to use it to understand his relationship with Jesse? There's no destination here, only the journey. Shot in dreamy black-and-white, the movie takes its time. Certainly there's a formulaic aspect to the bare-bones plot - a grumpy single man goes on a road trip with a cheeky, precocious kid (with moptop hair), both of them emerging as better people - but C'mon C'mon isn't formulaic in the slightest. It may not sound like much, but Mike Mills' drama is a rare mix of touching emotional transparency and a thoughtful, intuitive, essay-like structure as it examines how kids fit into the world.
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