Watched on Amazon Video

Fencepost winks are the ultimate in subtlety in Miranda July's bizarre film world, where ignorance masquerades as naivety and malice as clueless humour. In the director and screenwriter's third feature film, the latter aims at social neglect, handicaps, child abuse, poverty and dependence: defining attributes of the pathological nuclear family at the centre of the rudimentary plot. Three tough chapters use sledgehammer metaphors and intrusive allegories to convey a truism full of hypocritical humanity, sobering in its psychological one-dimensionality and sociological reduction.

Earthquakes mark emotional shocks and the main characters anxiously await "the big one", whose expected occurrence is supposed to sell a silly anti-climax as profound drama. Foam oozing from the wall in the makeshift clan shelter symbolises familial baggage that July never fleshes out for lack of interest in the walking caricatures. A striking postulate about the allegedly all-healing effect of physical closeness conceals the speculative presentation of destructive family relationships. These create personalities like the petty criminal Old Dolio Dyne (ODD; so clever ... it's not). The trauma of the daughter (Evan Rachel Wood deserves better roles) of the paranoid Robert (Richard Jenkins) and the devious Theresa (Debra Winger), conditioned to lifelong complicity, serves as a template for repetitive jokes and overblown kitsch that replaces human empathy. Bobby Vinton's "Mr. Lonely" tirelessly paraphrases Old Dolio's repressed need for affection. This is finally fulfilled by Manic Pixie Dream Girl Melanie (Gina Rodriguez), whose family integration explains a perverse punchline. But instead of manipulation and abuse, the shallow production sees only rose-coloured bubbles.

Miranda July's family farce, oscillating between sentimentality and malicious joy, is a milestone of dramatic sophistication and empathy. This cranky pastiche of social comedy and romance is characterised by the blasé coldness of feeling from which the protagonist suffers. With her own bourgeois detachment, July consumes the everyday struggle for existence of economic down-and-outs and the mental effects of exploitative relationship constellations into a soft-focus, muted impromptu farce. The convincing leading actresses arouse more sympathy than the misery caricatures they embody.