Life can be a tough thing to get right.
It’s shockingly shorter than we imagined it to be, far more complex and demanding and our attempts to make the most of it come with a raft of unintended consequences which often bear little or no resemblance to the way we thought it would play itself out.
And as nearly-failed actor Aidan Bloom (Zach Braff) has recently discovered, with the re-emergence of his dad Gabe’s (Mandy Patinkin) cancer and the resultant necessary diversion of his remaining funds to funding his treatment instead of paying for the education of Aidan’s children, Grace (Joey King) and Tucker (Pierce Gagnon) at a Jewish school, full of unwelcome surprises.
Realising that he is close to having to abandon his dream of a successful acting career – his last paying job was a dandruff commercial quite a way in the past, necessitating his wife Sarah’s (Kate Hudson) employment in a dead end data entry job where she is routinely harassed by her douchebag cubicle “mate” – he struggles to find a way to both keep his daydream visions of life afloat while dealing with its rather less palatable realities.
One point in his favour is that, unlike his loveable slacker brother Noah (Josh Gad), who lives alone in a trailer by the ocean blogging his way to a fortune after his goal of creating a killer app came to nothing, he has been forced through marriage and fatherhood to assume at least some of the trappings of responsible adulthood, making him a little more equipped than he might otherwise be to deal with its unexpected adversity.
It’s this maturity, a rarity in the sort of indie films that occupy the “Slice of Life” genre where characters are frequently failures in every conceivable area of their life – granted it makes for often satisfying films but you do wonder how these people manage to get out of bed in the morning, let along interact with others in any meaningful way – that grants Aidan, who has enjoyably functional, rewarding and close relationships with his wife and children, any chance of working out how to handle the many issues that challenge him during the course of the film.
Given the pressures on him to deal with his father’s illness, home school his kids, and help his wife work her way through an increasing sense that she has given up more than she has gained from life – though there is no suggestion she resents supporting him or the kids – it’s a wonder he doesn’t disappear more often into a dreamworld he has maintained since childhood in which he and his brother are hero spaceman out to save the world (and which feature in delightful, resonant short scenes throughout the movie).
But as he sagely notes in the film’s monologue, he has begun to realise that perhaps he is an ordinary guy, not so much an all-capable saviour as the one who needs to be rescued.
It’s more an admission, I suspect that his character, who possesses many of the winning characteristics such as a bright wit and unorthodox view of the world – his family maintains an often-dipped into swear jar to which he is the main contributor – that made his lead role in his previous directorial effort, 2004’s affectingly-told Garden State, such a pleasure to watch, doesn’t have a handle on what it takes to really be holistically successful in life.
But then who really does?
Neither his wife Grace, who is given substance, sensitivity, and impressive stickability by Kate Hudson in a revelatory performance, nor father Gabe, who loves his sons but is unable to express it in quite the same way his late wife did – the hospital scene between these two beautifully drawn characters is one of the highlights of this touching, heartfelt film – have it all together, despite appearances, nor do his kids who like anyone trying to find their way into the world have to deal with issues of self-esteem and capability and how to keep a sense of fun alive while developing into responsible adults.
(A number of the scenes involving Aidan and his kids are a joy with the playfully unusual but loving dad’s idea of education involving trips to the desert to watch the sunset and cook marshmallows over a campfire and fixing fences and re-plastering their dilapidated pool.)
And that is the simple, charming message of Wish I Was Here, which neatly balances what we long and wish for, with the realities on the ground, and the struggle that every last one of us has to navigate that uncomfortable and seldom, satisfyingly-traverse area in-between.
Though suffused by a quirky, whimsical spirit, the film is refreshingly real-to-life, peopled by characters who aren’t manifest failures, caricatures of cartoonishly-inept adulthood, but rather well-meaning fathers, wives, kids, and brothers, who all love each other with varying degrees of success, and are caught somewhere in the limbo between where they are and where they thought they’d be.
The script by Zach Braff and his brother Adam, is emotionally pitch-perfect with sparkling dialogue and believable scenarios, the performances nuanced, at turns funny and zany and then despairing and mournful and finally hopeful, and the message realistic but optimistic, as they navigate their way through the sort of peaks and valleys of life that anyone with a pulse will find instantly and profoundly familiar.