Kajillionaire (2020)
Directed by Miranda July
Two con artists have spent 26 years training their only daughter to swindle, scam and steal at every turn. During a desperate and hastily conceived heist, they charm a stranger into joining them, only to have their entire world turned upside down.
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8 films that influenced Kajillionaire
What critics say influenced Kajillionaire
However, unlike the population of Ocean’s Eleven (which is explicitly referenced at one point), she doesn’t engage in sophisticated or elaborate schemes.
She’s ordinary enough to be exhilarated by the idea of joining the family’s antics, which remind her of the Ocean’s Eleven franchise.
I can understand the potential appeal of a "heist" movie in which the thieves are lower-class small-timers, although Steven Soderbergh pulled that off in a much more convincing fashion a few years ago with Logan Lucky (another Soderbergh heist movie, Ocean's Eleven, is name-checked in Kajillionaire.)
The heist in its opening scene (which might as well be a low-key homage to Ocean’s Eleven) sees Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood) diving and tumbling around to avoid the cameras as she collects the mail.
But Melanie eagerly asks to become part of the gang (she confuses their little scams with Ocean's Eleven -style heists), and knows a way they might take advantage of the elderly.
As her parents, the craggy ex-hippies personified by Debra Winger and Richard Jenkins, who shuffle about like anti-capitalist zombies, aren’t as strikingly defined, but the family dynamic is reminiscent of something like Running on Empty (1988), embodying the pronounced consequences of parents living outside the realm of the law, and how their choices eventually warp their children.
The similarities between Miranda July’s Kajillionaire and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite feel like they’re important enough to acknowledge.
July’s premise might remind some of recent Oscar winner Parasite , but whereas a destitute family of four created a dangerous co-dependency with a wealthy family in Bong Joon-ho’s instant classic, Kajillionaire finds a family of three knocking off cheap scams and tiny schemes, trying to scrape by from one theft to the next.
Like Hirokazu Koreeda’s delicate 2018 film Shoplifters and Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 masterpiece Parasite , Kajillionaire disregards the idea of the glamorous con and settles fully into the concept of scam as a daily grind.
At the age of 26, she has the sensibilities of a 14-year-old boy, wears a bright aqua blue jogging jacket that rivals that of Seth Rogen’s journo nerd in “Long Shot” (2019) and is possessor of bad dance moves reminiscent of Ben Affleck’s smooth wannabe in “Good Will Hunting” (1998).
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Sebastian Wintero shot Kajillionaire with a Panavision anamorphic C-series lens, giving the story a wide image that curves the actor’s surroundings and backgrounds, foregrounding the idea that these four people are in an isolated world of their making—not unlike Adam Sandler’s Howard Ratner in Uncut Gems , who sees the world through his own prism.
To quote Kate Winslet in The Holiday, “square peg, round hole”.
I can understand the potential appeal of a "heist" movie in which the thieves are lower-class small-timers, although Steven Soderbergh pulled that off in a much more convincing fashion a few years ago with Logan Lucky (another Soderbergh heist movie, Ocean's Eleven, is name-checked in Kajillionaire.)
“Kajillionaire” falls into the off-the-grid genre and the know-it-all subgenre (such as “Captain Fantastic”), in which parents take children into isolation not merely for the purpose of survival but in pursuit of an ideal that differs drastically from any that children are likely to acquire from peers, school, or media.