IF

The concept of the childhood imaginary friend hasn’t been deeply explored in film, but there are some examples. From the dark comedy Drop Dead Fred, to horror films like Pin, May, and this year’s Imaginary, to the wartime dramedy Jojo Rabbit, filmmakers have used their stories to examine this psycho-social phenomenon that so many people, especially children, have experienced. In his new family comedy, writer-director-star John Krasinski explores the imaginary friend as coping mechanism. While the film has a few effective moments, overall it is frustrating and repetitive.

Courtesy Paramount Pictures

The story opens with a montage of the life of a young girl named Bea and her parents. There is some effective restraint used here in laying out that Bea’s mother is sick all through imagery rather than hammering the point home with dialogue. There is a fade-out, and when the story starts again, it is with a now 12 year old Bea (Cailey Fleming) arriving at her grandmother’s (Fiona Shaw) New York City apartment. She’s staying there because her father (Krasinski) has to have heart surgery. She’s understandably upset after having already lost her mom. Her father is constantly joking around trying to lighten the mood, but Bea tells him he doesn’t need to do that because she’s not a kid anymore. While out wandering, she spots what she believes to be a little girl who runs away when she notices Bea looking at her. Bea follows the girl into the building, but when she knocks on the apartment door, a man’s voice tells her there’s no little girl there. On another night, she hears a commotion and follows the girl, now revealed to be Blossom (voice of Phoebe Waller Bridge) a butterfly-esque cartoon character drawn in a 30s-era style and the man Cal (Ryan Reynolds). She watches as they retrieve Blue (voice of Steve Carell), a giant furry purple creature. It turns out that Blue and Blossom are displaced imaginary friends (IFs) whose children have grown up and forgotten about them. Blue was trying to connect with a new child. They live with Cal in the meantime.

Courtesy Paramount Pictures

Looking for a way to keep herself occupied while her dad is in the hospital, Bea volunteers to help. Cal tells her that she needs to have a job interview in order to help, and takes her to a retirement home for imaginary friends. There she meets a bevy of characters, including their wise elder Lewis (voice of the late Louis Gossett Jr.). One huge dance number later, Bea is on the job. The initial job of finding new kids for the IFs, which she attempts with the help of Benjamin (Alan Kim), a boy in the same hospital as her dad, doesn’t work. On Lewis’s advice, she next moves to trying to reunite the IFs with their now adult kids, which is eventually successful. The final step is Bea facing her own fears and realizing she’s not yet as grown up as she thought.

On the positive side, the live-action and animated pieces mix together well, particularly in the large-scale IF-retirement home sequence. Legendary cinematographer Janusz Kaminski ensures that the film looks good.The team also does a very nice job in the design of the IFs themselves, with a variety of styles and concepts to help convey the depth of children’s imaginations. The voice acting, from a murderer’s row of Krasinski’s friends and other celebrities, including George Clooney, Sam Rockwell, Emily Blunt, Maya Rudolph, and Matt Damon is all solid. The live action performances are more of a mixed bag. Reynolds is playing gruff for much of the film, and does it well enough. Fiona Shaw is solid but feels mostly wasted outside of one showcase scene. Cailey Fleming’s performance is not an especially strong child performance, though it’s hard to fault a young actor who has to play against CGI for much of a film. Another positive is the score from Michael Giacchino, which fits the film’s balance of whimsy and sadness.

Courtesy Paramount Pictures

The big problem with the film is the script. Krasinski should have worked with a co-writer on this, because the finished film feels like ideas in search of connective tissue. The big set pieces are fine, but everything connecting those scenes feels barely thought out. It’s a film where a twelve year old has the seemingly unsupervised run of New York City, particularly in light of a late-film reveal. A film where there’s a tearful “it’s your father” moment after the surgery in order to get Bea back to the hospital, but when she and her grandmother arrive, the supervising nurse (Liza Colon-Zayas) immediately deflates the tension and says he just needs rest. The themes of grief and how to deal with it are interesting ones, particularly in relation to how a child copes with such things, but Krasinski’s script doesn’t seem to be interested in more than a surface look.

IF opens this Friday.