Jimpa

Jimpa opens decently well in its first moments, with Olivia Colman as Hannah, an Australian acting teacher and director, preparing to visit her father. She is taking her husband and non-binary sixteen-year old, Frances, who announces at the airport that they want to spend the next year in Amsterdam with Jimpa, their grandfather, played by John Lithgow in what has long been his patented underperformed overacting. Jimpa, you see, left Adelaide and his family decades ago in order to pursue a separate life as an openly gay man. Hannah and her husband have a fascinating conversation that hints toward nuance and a lack of preaching. This is a false start.

Courtesy Kino Lorber

The film becomes a moralizing lecture that wants to show how open it is, but this only results in being largely about nothing at all. It is at a times a poorly thought-out gender studies course in film form, as constructed and taught by a freshman. Given the director based this on her own experiences, there is obvious passion here, but this is a case where the closeness to the material has resulted in an often-unpleasant earnestness.

The film struggles to be as balanced or thoughtful as it wants to be, or to say what it thinks it is saying, because it is the rare case of where it sometimes becomes the thing it condemns by the way in which it presents itself.  Here, Jimpa sets up Frances for their first sexual encounter, and it is treated not as manipulation or a breach of trust, but as something charming and fine because, after all, as Jimpa likes to keep saying “we are simply not them” and the we he refers to is the larger gay community.

Courtesy Kino Lorber

That, of course, is part of the problem. The film does not properly interrogate how closed off to the range of sexuality Jimpa is, and never explores just how fragile Frances is, and how, as a teen who has never been outside a classroom in terms of sexuality, everything is just academic. It is interesting, to a small degree, seeing two or more gay people in film speak about how relationships work with different levels and types of consent. Yet, it becomes distasteful when it presents these as not just valuable differences, but advantages. Yes, communication is always preferable, but is it really better just because of what one is?

The film becomes a lot of people talking over one another and not communicating, not hearing, but merely bloviating about their own needs and wants, with others inevitably apologizing for how they were treated-yes, victims being the ones offering an I am sorry-and even when one character literally says “I want to be heard” the film fails to voice them. It is too interested in laying out the social theories of Jimpa and Frances at the expense, too often, of Frances themselves.

Courtesy Kino Lorber

A film more honest with its audience and less inclined to hear itself bloviate, would investigate the hypocrisies in its own arguments, or avoid them altogether. This film is what happens when allies forget they are not the people they are advocating for. There is passion and earnestness and the film comes from the real experiences of those in charge of making it, yet it comes across as maudlin, well-meaning pap. The film has a very talented actress, but gives her little to do other than nod or shake her head in displeasure or assent. This is an inert film, where things happen to people and they thank those who do it, when they should be questioning them. The best thing you can do is to avoid Jimpa, like his family ought to have done. Not worth the worship.

Jimpa is now playing in select theaters.