We didn’t know it at the time but 2018 saw the arrival of two exciting new actor-turned-filmmakers in the game. Bradley Cooper devastated audiences with A Star Is Born, and John Krasinski showed a surprising knack for Steven Spielberg with A Quiet Place. I still maintain hope for Cooper as a budding auteur, but I think since 2018 I’ve been quietly anticipating Kransinski’s next forays. His latest film, IF, proves that his Spielbergian influences are sharp as ever, if not as fresh and exciting this time around. It may even be time to chase a new director muse altogether.
IF starts with a growing up montage straight outta Up, or Arrival. Bea (Cailey Fleming) is raised by a cheery mommy (Catharine Daddario) and daddy (Krasinski himself). They fill their home with endless play and laughter and refrigerator drawings, until mommy dies of cancer. Hard cut to Bea, now 12, as her dad awaits a critical surgery, and our precocious protagonist is deathly afraid that what happened to mommy will happen to daddy. In steeling herself for the unknown, she’s stowed away all the crayons and make believe. That is, until she encounters imaginary friends from all over the city—IFs for short.
I thought A LOT about Hook while watching this movie. Bea’s initial resistance to the IF shenanigans has echoes of Robin Williams’ Peter Pan, who rejects his own hallowed legend for the stout honor of being a grown up with responsibilities. (Krasinski, too, has Patch Adams energy in his hospital stay.) There’s also a touch of Close Encounters of the Third Kind; Bea’s eventual surrender to the imaginary quest looks much like Roy’s obsession to leave the real world behind.
Krasinski is just as inspired by Spielberg here as he was in A Quiet Place, which fiendishly riffed on the survival horrors of Jaws and War of the Worlds. But IF doesn’t quite achieve the same cinematic liftoff. Instead it feels like Krasinski is straight up cosplaying Spielberg. He even has Janusz Kaminski a.k.a. Spielberg’s longtime collaborator as cinematographer.
We’ve seen this level of cosplaying before: J.J. Abrams. He went from leading with Spielberg as an influence to the point of full-blown imitating him in Super 8, and the back-to-back odysseys of reaching for the stars (Trek & Wars) led to a prolonged identity crisis for the filmmaker. I’m all for citing influences, but when it comes to Spielberg, this ought to be a cautionary tale.
To Krasinski’s credit, the stuff of dreams isn’t owned by Spielberg. Bea’s story is a coming of age, minus the extraterrestrials and galaxies far, far away. In the wake of her mother’s death, she’s crash-landed firmly in reality; there’s no going back to Neverland, or so she thinks. Her journey (twelfth-life crisis?) then is quite literally Finding Neverland. Or it’s closer to My Neighbor Totoro—kids reckoning with mortality in their nascency. It’s the sorrowful beating heart of the movie that Cailey Fleming nails with bubblegum sincerity. It’s easy to get lost following Peter Pan or your influences; with a bright young star, IF powers through the hodge-podge.
It’s nice to see Ryan Reynolds trying again. Ever since Deadpool went supersonic, he’s coasted through two Hitman’s Bodyguards, a cameo in Hobbs & Shaw, plus a couple of Netflix and Apple TV+ movies that were filmed in a warehouse. While I like a Free Guy or a Life here and there, he’s been doing the same dry humor shtick since his first stab at the whole superhero thing. Maybe it’s because he’s opposite someone who’s actually in the room with him, but here Reynolds feels more alive than ever as Cal, another character who sees IFs. (For the true stans, this movie sees Reynolds back in Definitely Maybe territory.) IF has the sense to tone down his trademark verbal wit in favor of slapstick and physical humor. I just wish the voice cast were as alive as the movie’s human stars.
The likes of Steve Carrell, Awkwafina, Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Sam Rockwell, Keegan-Michael Key, Jon Stewart, Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph, George Clooney, even Blake Lively are in this, all voicing a wide array of IFs. (Tell me with a straight face that Krasinski didn’t call in favors from everybody.) I mentioned Bradley Cooper up top because he, too, is in this. And yet, the only voice actor who came to play is Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Blossom. If you’re familiar with her audacious sense of humor then you know she can’t possibly wield any of that in a kid’s movie, but she does have an indelible charm that shines through the movie’s uninspired animation.
The real disappointment here is that even with a wealth of inspiration – and a mega A-list roster at its disposal – IF isn’t as deep or creative so much as borrowed and borrowed HEAVILY. Steve Carrell’s Blue is essentially copyright infringement Grimace. Emily Blunt is a unicorn because there’s always gotta be one in a kid’s movie ever since Despicable Me made it a rule—a movie that stars Carrell. George Clooney voices an astronaut, a deliberate nod to Gravity for some reason. Hell, even Bradley Cooper is just doing the voice of Rocket Raccoon but for a talking glass of water.
I get what Krasinski’s doing here—that much of our childhood imagination traces over each other. We all start out drawing stick figures and sunshine and rainbows. As kids, too, we play with stuffed animals and give voices to our plushie pals. Disney’s whole bread and butter before fairy tales and princesses were a buncha talking animals… So are we inspired to create, or imitate? It’s a question worth asking, but one that the script isn’t interested in answering. And, going from micro to macro, that feels like the crossroads that Krasinski is stuck in as a filmmaker. Bottom line, the designs of these IFs along with Bea’s sense of play – both of which can take on any shape imaginable – ultimately feel shallow and unoriginal.
It’s not for a lack of trying. When Bea rediscovers her creative genie, it sends Cal scurrying up and down a shape-shifting palace. It’s directed with such free-floating joy like a veritable Neverland or Wonderland or what have you, and Reynolds plays the sequence like Buster Keaton got dropped in a Gene Kelly musical. Therein lays IF’s untapped potential. If this is a kid’s unbridled playpen we’re talking, how come there isn’t an actual musical number? Or some thrilling swashbuckling adventures? Or, for the love of god, an animated character that isn’t a talking unicorn or teddy bear?
For all of the effects on display, the simplest one is more practical than all the rest. There’s a scene where Bea and Blossom watch as Bea’s grandmother (played by Fiona Shaw) rediscovers a long lost muse. She dances in her apartment amidst the backdrop of a twinkling New York City and it’s lit magnificently, and felt unutterably. In movies, it’s often a human character looking starry-eyed at something out of this world; here it’s the opposite—an animated character beholding an ordinary human being, and we’re right there with Bea and Blossom in that wonderment.
There’s a theme park full of sugary sweetness and possibility in IF, which is why it’s so baffling that the movie lacks imagination. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t occasionally enchanted. There’s a twist at the end that doesn’t reconfigure the movie so much as deepen our perspective of Bea—that for all of her grown-up posturing, she is actually more in tune with her childhood than she gives herself credit for. (Also, girl, you ain’t that far away from your childhood either.) It’s a sweet sentiment, perhaps too artificially deep fried to pull on those heartstrings, but still sweet and well-intentioned nonetheless.
Who am I to split the atom here, or crayon? This is guaranteed to hit all of those feel-good quadrants for kids and their parents at a time when there’s a dearth of family movies to see in theaters. IF, for all of its imaginative shortcomings, will do just fine as a family escape.
2.5 McDonald’s lawsuits out of 4 👍
ADRIAN MANUEL 