(courtesy IMP Awards)
There is a fine line between laudable intent and misfired execution in Hollywood and IF, unfortunately sails right through and over it, and around it, landing somewhere far away from where you can tell writer-director John Krasinski meant it to.
It’s a pity because there’s such a wonderful film here desperately wanting to come out; enough of it does emerge, of course, that the film is a sweetly enjoyable piece of family-friendly filmmaking that leaves you feeling like someone gave a most of a rather sweet, heartwarming hug, but it also feels like a series of near-miss moments that don’t quite earn what is, by any measure, quite a beautifully heartrending final act.
Let’s start with the parts of the film that do work; they may not add up to a fully coherent movie but they are appealing enough that you’re happy, streaming at least, to give up approaching close to two hours of your time.
The idea behind IF, which stands for Imaginary Friend, is gorgeously heartfelt.
12-year-old Bea (Cailey Fleming who is just superb) is in New York City, staying for the first time since she was a little girl with her grandma (Fiona Shaw) – no idea why such a long time between grandparental visits since the two seem to get on very well and Bea’s dad (John Krasinski) seems to like her too – while a major operation is performed on her father.
He’s goofy man-child who seems intent on making Bea’s life as magically whimsical as possible, but having grown up fast due to some UP-level family trauma which is detailed in the film’s slightly-too-long warm-and-fuzzy montage of huggably fun and vivacious family memories, Bea is in no mood to be as lighthearted as her dad.
She’s nursing a serious grief hangover, and while she’s not nasty or difficult, just sad, all of it pooled, it seems in Fleming’s brilliantly expressive eyes, she’s in no mood to indulge her dad’s unceasingly upbeat world-viewing and acting which includes dancing with the portable pole on which his (fake) drips sits.
Her dad’s nurse (Liza Colón-Zayas) loves the show, and has the time to watch it all and applaud – just what the hell kind of expensive place is her father staying at; this is America with its sky-high medical fees, remember – but Bea, while she smiles, low-key admonishes her dad for being so damn goofy.
While dad waits for his op, the prep for which seems to stretch on for narratively convenient days, Bea is at her loving grandmother’s massively large, sprawling apartment that looks straight out of fantasy New York City central casting.
While her grandmother seems quite attentive while she and Bea are at home, she’s seemingly happy for her granddaughter to roam the city with little real oversight, and while you can explain that away with the fact that Bea is very mature for her age, it’s still a big city and a grieving kid with the weight of several worlds on her shoulder, and if nothing else, Bea needs some support getting to and from the hospital?
But then, much of IF‘s shakily connected story wouldn’t work if Bea’s grandmother wanted to helicopter grandparent her way through proceedings, and so, gleefully neglected, Bea is able to go on grand adventures that spring forth when she sees a strange young girl with antenna and a gift for balletic dancing, Blossom (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) in the company of an older human male, played by Ryan Reynolds in strangely subdued mode, who seems to spend his weirdly, secretly-funded days reuniting Imaginary Friends of all shapes and sizes such as purple, lovable furry behemoth Blue (Steve Carell), who is close to the emotional centre of the film (close, we said, not the actual holder of the plot central prize), Lewis (Lewis Gossett, Jr. to whom pays touching post-credit, post-mortem tribute) and Unicorn (Emily Blunt).
It’s whimsical, fun adventuring with real heart and as Bea journeys across the city from her home in the brownstones to Coney Island, where a magically malleable surprise awaits, she comes slowly alive again to the idea that life can be clever and meaningful and as happily slapstick as her dad always makes it out to be.
It’s a wild and wonderful brew, and great leaps of logic and suspensions of logic aside, it goes a long way to making IF the expansively lovely and heartrendingly effective film you’re almost willing it to be.
Alas, it doesn’t quite make it, but the result, made up of so many laudable pieces that don’t quite come together, still feels like the reassuring you desperately need as an adult who has seen some sh*t (and lordy, haven’t we all?).
The frustrating thing about IF is that so much of it is so almost-there wonderful.
The world-building is so close to feeling all enveloping and wondrously escapist even as it rests in some real Peter Pan-level grief and longing, the characters and their trying situations almost realised enough, and the storyline composed all kinds of really dreamily thoughtful and oddball-fun elements, the kind that if left to come to fruition would have subsumed you in sugar highs of wondrously moving delight.
But none of these admittedly beautiful and imaginative elements are ever allowed to fully reach their natural maturation point, and so you are left with moving and funny and wildly original elements that never quite feel like they are given their full due nor allowed to fully integrate as much as they could have.
It’s a desperate pity because here is a classic in the making that with a little more finesse and care, could have something truly, transcendentally beautiful and vivaciously, imaginatively alive.
Still, for all of the almost-there-but-not-quite-yet (or ever, alas) feel to IF, and the sense that you missed on something quite coherently, affectingly magical, the film is still worth spending time with, if for no reason that it just about gets there in so many ways, and that it leaves appreciating anew how much it matters that we don’t lose our inner child–like vim and vigour and hopelessness, and that we keep seeing life as something that can possess light and hope and zest even as the onward march of time does it best to kill those things off.
In IF, it somehow doesn’t succeed, and for that reason alone, you’ll find yourself lost in a world of wondrous possibility, hoping and realising, like Bea, that messy though life can be, and hurtful at times, that happy endings are possible and it’s worth opening up your heart again because who knows where it will take you?
What would it feel like to be a kid again?