First off, let me apologize for the terrible pun in the movie, it’s almost beneath me. However, the writing of this movie … well, I’ll get to that.

I am still a defender of Garden State, Zach Braff’s first movie, which is the movie that made my dad understand why I thought Natalie Portman was talented (as I recall, he had only seen her in the Star Wars movies). But manic pixie dream girl assertions aside, the movie was interesting in that it used music in an interesting way to connect to emotional moments, using silence instead of dialogue, and was unafraid to not say everything that was obvious.

Wish I Was Here is written and directed by Zach Braff, who also plays the main character Aidan Bloom, a kid raised in a religious Jewish household until he decided it wasn’t meaningful to him. The movie’s conflicts start when he discovers that the payments for the very religious yeshiva (a private Jewish day school) which had been from his dad (Mandy Patinkin), because that was the only way they’d get the money, have stopped. And why? Oh, no reason. Just that his dad has inoperable cancer, and is paying for expensive, unlikely to work treatments. And Aidan’s brother Noah (Josh Gad), is living the life of a gadabout in a trailer, using his inheritance money from their mother and doing nothing with his life. Will he give money to help out? No, of course not, he doesn’t care about the religious stuff (I think, it was never really explained) or perhaps he’s kind of a jerk. And Aidan is a struggling actor (because of course he is), so he doesn’t have a job, while his wife Sarah (Kate Hudson) has a boring desk job with a coworker who’s probably harassing her. So we have our setup.

By this point, his daughter Grace, played by Joey King, is fully indoctrinated and religious, while his son Tucker (Pierce Gagnon) is just bored at school and at the religious prayer services. Hey, I think I knew kids like both of them when I went to religious school, although mine wasn’t as religious as the one portrayed here. Grace is a pretty Christian name, but I guess that’s one of many things Zach Braff missed with his probably Google-driven (and perhaps faulty memory-driver) portrayal of religious Jewish schooling and rabbis. The Jewish thing is one subplot here, but it’s just sort of there. I wasn’t really sure what the significance was about it. There’s this odd, dreamlike continuing thing with Zach hallucinating himself as a spaceman, which is connected to his brother having a very weird subplot about making a costume for Comic-Con. The Comic-Con thing was so weird and superfluous, it seemed like it was both meant to be funny and meaningful as a metaphor, but to me it was just silly.

Part of the problem with the movie is the tonal shifts, going from artsy serious drama movie to treacly family movie to slapstick silly movie. This movie was all over the damn place. Sure, it looks beautiful, that is true. And I can’t hate on the acting, which I found mostly decent. I really can’t hate on Mandy Patinkin, who acted a billion times better than the material he was given. But you can’t use Mandy Patinkin to trick me into liking your movie, Zach Braff! That sort of worked with Natalie Portman in Garden State, but I think that movie holds up a lot better. Here we get “told” things about our characters instead of learning as we go. We get moment after moment where characters are unbearably wise, instead of just letting us experience these characters naturally. We get a lot of weird religious symbolism that is seemingly shoehorned in there, and a bizarre costume plot that I despised.

Okay, so as for the rest of it. Joey King continues to impress as one of the best young actresses around, and Pierce Gagnon (who was so damn good in Looper, and is good RIGHT NOW in the TV show Extant) is okay given the simplistic character he’s given. Kate Hudson? She’s fine, but again, her character isn’t anything. And as for Braff, his character is just as confused as this movie is, which is a problem. I didn’t think his acting was bad, in fact I’d say he did a pretty good job. But he fell prey to so many impulses here, and perhaps it’s because the success of his Kickstarter made him just ignore anyone’s feedback instead of being forced to accept it to get funding. Or perhaps not, perhaps the studio would’ve made it much worse and banal and typical.

Because I’ll say one thing at least for this movie — it’s unique. It’s really unique. But hey, next time, lay off the melodramatic music cues, okay?

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