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Two of the more interesting synopses in this year’s SXSW Film & TV Festival program revealed themselves at the Zach Theater in Austin on back-to-back days to start the festival. While the overall profile of SXSW has dimmed a bit in the last couple years as streaming service originals have dominated too much of the Headliners category, there are still gems to be found when you get away from the Paramount. There’s one in this two-fer dispatch, joined by a film that has some strong ideas but doesn’t do enough with them.
The better of the two is Graham Parkes’ clever “Wishful Thinking,” a sci-fi rom-com that plays almost like “Marriage Story” meets “Colossal.” Do you ever get the sense that the temperature of your relationship has an impact on the world around you? Of course, it’s never one-to-one but we’ve all felt that snowballing effect of good and bad vibes in the way that happiness in our partnerships can feel like it’s leading to better things in other aspects of our life, and the inverse being just as true. Good and bad news comes in waves. What if we could control those waves with our emotions?
What Parkes imagines is a couple so powerful in their vibes that they can shift the world around them, impacting not just their surroundings but the entire world. What if a fight between you and your partner literally led to not only plants dying in your house but an actual earthquake? And what if a great orgasm opened career paths for not just you but those you know? It’s a fascinating way to riff on the idea of manifestation, the belief that we control the world around us, and how being a true partner requires giving up some of that control. It’s hard to manifest happiness when you feel betrayed.
Julia (Maya Hawke) and Charlie (Lewis Pullman) discover they have this remarkable power after attending a session with a pair of twin therapists (both played by Kate Berlant, having a moment in multiple SXSW films, including the Boots Riley and both films in this dispatch) who basically pull out of them their supernatural powers.
Before then, Julia and Charlie seemed headed for a break-up. She’s a game designer struggling with being unable to implement her vision because her boss (Randall Park) forces her to make awful sex games for rich clients. Charlie is a frustrated musician, worried he’s reaching that chapter break in life when he has to put potential futures on the shelf. He works as a sound technician, which allows for a very funny recording session with Jon Hamm, who actually becomes an effective recurring joke.
The sequences in “Wishful Thinking” in which Julia and Charlie learn the power of their relationship are clever and funny. They start fights to see what happens around them, and then they make up and fireworks literally appear in the sky. Of course, it’s all a symbol for how the people close to us actually do shape the way we look at the real world.
Hawke and Pullman are both consistently spectacular, the kind of young stars who inspire hope for long careers every time they’re on screen. He finds a funny, playful register he hasn’t been often allowed to play while she’s more magnetic with every film appearance. It’s a real collaboration between two actors who really understand the vision of their creator.
That vision gets a little less confident in the final act. There’s a bit with Charlie actually having a breakout hit that backfires on him that takes up too much screen time just as the movie is digging its nails into its thorny premise. How far would you go to “fake” happiness if it impacted the world around you? The truth is that no couple is always happy, and it’s unhealthy to obsess about having to be so. As “Wishful Thinking” approaches this complexity, it stumbles a bit, but that’s almost in keeping with its uncertain protagonists, two people fumbling their way through this impossible thing called love. Aren’t we all?
Less effective in truly maddening ways is Kevin Hamedani’s “The Saviors,” a movie that thinks it’s saying much more than it ultimately is. It’s a timely movie in its messaging of xenophobia and increased suspicion of our neighbors, but its filmmaking has a frustrating habit of derailing its best intentions. “The Saviors” is one of those films that does nothing once, repeating every idea to make sure it’s thoroughly pounded into your head, and it strands a good cast in a think piece of a film that prioritizes themes and twists over human connection.
Sean (Adam Scott) and Kim Harrison (Danielle Deadwyler) are a couple in crisis, an average pair headed for divorce. He sleeps in the basement, and the pair can barely talk to one another. To help with the mortgage, they rent out a guest house to a Middle Eastern brother and sister named Amir (film MVP Theo Rossi) and Jahan Razi (Nazanin Boniadi), who arrive in the middle of the night with a suspicious trunk.
From the beginning, Sean suspects something is up with the Razis. Of course, the blatant racism of his family (including Kate Berlant and Ron Perlman) doesn’t help, even as Sean pushes back against their stereotypes. But then things start to get weird. Sean sees bright lights in the middle of the night, intercepts blueprints coming in the mail, and finds what looks like bomb parts in the guest house. He eventually convinces Kim to join him on the suspicious side of the property, and the two begin to investigate their new tenants, getting closer as they do. Nothing fixes a broken relationship like xenophobia.
Of course, the Razis are not what they seem or what the Harrisons think they are: There’s no movie otherwise. Knowing that, “The Saviors” has a puzzle box aspect in that we, the audience, play with trying to figure out what the Harrisons are misreading about their admittedly suspicious neighbors. Did I mention that the President is coming to town soon for a funeral? Or that Sean keeps having visions of a bright light and a bombed-out future? It’s a lot.
And yet it ends up being frustratingly little, too. There’s just nothing to hold onto when one looks back on “The Saviors,” a movie that arguably would have been more interesting told from the other perspective, the POV of a refugee brother and sister dealing with their nosey neighbors. But that’s a more daring film than this one, a movie that ultimately made me angry not at the world but at a film that thinks it’s pushing buttons but doesn’t press nearly hard enough.
from Roger Ebert https://ift.tt/eDYtuS2
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