One trip to 'Palm Springs' is already too much
Sundance Film Festival
The phoniness of “Palm Springs” feels like painting a patio blue and calling it a pool, and then being dumb enough to jump in. I’m absolutely baffled by the love for this movie.
Its understanding of relationships makes “The Bachelor” look wise, and its living-the-same-day-on-repeat premise is more “Before I Fall” than “Groundhog Day.” As Nyles (Andy Samberg) and Sarah (Cristin Milioti) relive her sister’s (Camila Mendes) wedding day over and over, much time is spent with people not having any fun, and the feeling is contagious. Worse, the film’s efforts to turn animosity into chemistry go less than nowhere. It’s not just that the actors don’t click, though they don’t. It’s not just that the characters are obnoxious, which they are. It’s that the film deprives them any perspective about each other’s choices and flaws while simultaneously trying to suggest a deep connection and profound understanding of accepting people, warts and all. Romantic comedies don’t get much more disingenuous than this.
Look at the scene in the desert, when -- spoiler alert, sort of -- Sarah tells Nyles she was married for two years and knew it wouldn’t work out from the start but went through with it anyway. “Ignoring all that would make me destined to repeat it,” she says. In what’s supposed to be one of this story’s emotional peaks, first-time feature writer Andy Siara is miles away from actually revealing anything. There’s no sense of why Sarah did this, why she knew the relationship wouldn’t work, what actually happened, or the fact that just because that happened doesn’t mean it couldn’t again.
Throughout this labored slice of hot garbage, the characters are all attitude and no dimension, so when they learn some terrible things about each other, the film’s skin-deep solution is just to skip right past that and pretend their love is simply massive enough to transcend disturbing behaviors. Combine that with Psych 101 points about choices and meaning and this charmless affair feels like someone tried to remake “I Heart Huckabees” for Katherine Heigl.
Sci-fi can put a great twist on love stories. In recent years, the metaphysical oddities of “The One I Love” and “Safety Not Guaranteed” inspired sweetness, vulnerability and tough reflection about what people want and need from each other in relationships, and how different versions of that play out over time. The high concept of "Ruby Sparks" explored romantic fantasy vs. reality, and NBC’s “The Good Place” found truth and fun in karma. “Palm Springs,” which briefly considers what people might really do in this twisted situation and then just gives up, is a narrative and psychological dead end, made worse by first-time feature director Max Barbakow seeming unsure if he wants to make a cartoon or a sobering meditation on finding peace against chaos. A few great moments from Samberg (a scene in which he glides among guests on the dance floor deserves swoons) get lost entirely against the fraudulence of the dynamic between Nyles and Sarah. This is especially true because Milioti -- whose failure as the titular character in “How I Met Your Mother” should have been a clue not to cast her again as the big-time love interest that the main dude meets at a wedding -- is just so false here. Her freakout moments are over-the-top and unfunny, and in conversation she never makes Sarah register as a real person rather than just a generic trainwreck.
This could have been a movie that really explores connection fostered through lack of options, but “Palm Springs” explicitly refuses that reading to claim something bigger -- while also giving time for irritating diversions like a wedding guest (J.K. Simmons!) who’s hunting down Nyles. You’d never believe the guys from The Lonely Island produced this exhausting, two-chuckle effort, which seems to repurpose the subtitle of the hilarious “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping” as a threat. It succeeds only in transferring the sensation of being trapped, desperate for release.
D+
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