The most charitable read on John Krasinski’s IF is that using your imagination shouldn’t be bound by traditional story structure, so why should a film about unfettered imagination need the same? Even then, there’s so much connective tissue missing from scene to scene that it feels less like IF is going for abstract vibes than it’s succumbing to a traumatic brain injury, ultimately and awkwardly landing on a moral far too late to have the impact it deserves.
Twelve-year-old Bea (Cailey Fleming) lost her mother when she was younger, and now her father (Krasinski) is set to go under the knife at a New York City hospital to fix an issue with his heart, forcing Bea to stay with her grandmother (Fiona Shaw) until he recovers. Bea is at the age where she’s trying to grow up in a hurry, especially in light of the fact that she’s theoretically likely to wind up an orphan. Emphasis on theoretically, since dad is weirdly obtuse about telling anyone, especially Bea, exactly what’s wrong with him or what his chances are of surviving.
Bea spends her time preparing for the worst until the day she spots a Betty Boop-style ballerina butterfly, Blossom (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), skulking around her apartment building, getting in heated discussions with her grumpy upstairs neighbor Cal (Ryan Reynolds) and a big fuzzy purple giant named Blue (Steve Carrell). Turns out, Cal is a reluctant caretaker for a placement program-slash-retirement home for imaginary friends whose services are no longer required by the children who dreamed them up. Left with the need to do something productive that’s not waiting for her father to live or die, Bea decides to partner up with Cal to take on the job.
That’s a rich premise with near-infinite possibilities for poignancy and wild humor, as anyone who’s ever watched a single episode of Craig McCracken’s excellent Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends back in the early aughts can attest to. In a bubble, every scene after Bea takes the job is lovingly executed, particularly the showstopper sequence of showing the girl expanding the retirement home to not just a few side rooms off a common hallway, but a multitude of wacky pocket universes that bleed into each other at will.
Also of note are the numerous scenes of Cal and Bea running around New York, trying to match people up with new imaginary friends, using the power of memory to conjure up childhoods, and auditioning which friends are right for the job, leading to a cavalcade of fun celebrity voice cameos in the process. But Bea’s relationship with her own maturity and her father’s inability to take things seriously has no bearing on her work with the imaginary friends, who she never thinks of telling her father or grandmother about, and they seem perfectly fine with that, despite Bea disappearing for hours at a time and paying infrequent visits to her sick parent.
In the end, the fun of the premise and the emotional crux of the story never intertwine. That disconnect cheapens the earnestness of the film’s construction, making even Janusz Kaminski and Michael Giacchino’s wonderful work feel like cheap smash grabs for the heartstrings. Krasinski’s material isn’t cynical in the slightest but seems unable or unwilling to settle on what exactly it wants to say until the pre-credits sequence: a montage of ancillary characters from the film meeting their imaginary friends again as adults that is so simple and moving, it makes the bewildered nature of the rest of the film feel even more unfortunate in retrospect.
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