Wish I Was Here *** (2014, Zach Braff, Kate Hudson, Mandy Patinkin) – Movie Review

Zach Braff stars as struggling actor Aidan Bloom, married to Sarah (Kate Hudson), who ends up trying to home school his two children when his father Gabe (Mandy Patinkin) decides to pull the plugs on paying for private education. The father wants to divert his income into trying to stay alive, as he’s just been diagnosed with cancer.

Braff co-writes with the older bother Adam J. Braff, as well as directing. This is a sweet, likeable film, with appealing, effective performances from a sterling cast.

A lot of it turns out to be about the father dying of cancer, which, very strangely, you don’t really glean from any publicity or advertising. And so, once again as with the concurrent What We Did On Our Holiday, this sitcom turns out to be a breezy, life-affirming comedy drama about a man dying of cancer. And again this idea is pretty hard to take. say it once more, comedies about people dying of cancer are the least amusing of all movies. Gabe Bloom says: ‘Eventually things get tragic enough and then they circle around to comedy.’ Unfortunately I’m not sure this is really true.

Another lot of the film turns out to be about the Braff character’s lack of purpose and direction, already middle-ageing in his mid-30s. And it turns out that both his wife and brother (Josh Gad) have their big issues too. So it’s an early mid-life crisis angst movie.

The film’s angst scenes and tragic moments are inevitably a huge downer. Woody Allen used to be able to make this kind of thing actually funny, but Braff can’t. Interesting, yes, funny, no. The film’s very well played by all its actors, but it’s tough to make it work in a comedy.

Braff is excellent in his usual warm but melancholic Scrubs persona. Jim Parsons puts in a couple of useful cameo appearance scenes as a fellow actor. It’s good to see him, but it would be nice if he had more to do. Braff’s Scrubbs co-star Donald Faison has a small cameo.

Maybe more of the struggling actor stuff and less of the father dying would have been better. Patinkin’s role is very tricky but he does it more than well enough. Hudson makes quite a bit out of a star supporting role, making her presence felt in a good way.

Perhaps the film needs more impact, but it isn’t that kind of film, and it does work quite nicely as a low-impact movie. It’s no earth shatterer on either the comedy or drama fronts, but it’s likeable, laid back and quite appealing. Braff’s a very talented, much loved TV star, but it’s still proving hard for him to translate to the big screen. It’s 10 whole years since his first movie, Garden State.

The director hailed the film as the most commercially-distributed film backed by Kickstarter. Braff’s Kickstarter campaign aimed to raise $2million in a month, but managed to surpass it in the first 48 hours. It ended up attracting more than 47,000 contributors.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Movie Review

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