Kajillionaire Puts the Capitalist Family on Display

‘M ost people want to be kajillionaires; that’s how they get you hooked,” explains Robert Dyne (Richard Jenkins) in Kajillionaire. Con artist Dyne heads a small clan of grifters that include his wife Theresa (Debra Winger) and daughter Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood). They dress like hobos while pulling scams in modern Los Angeles that include slinking past the landlord of a cubicle-style apartment where they must perform an abstract-art chore collecting soap suds that ooze from the ceiling.

That’s right, Kajillionaire is an art thing — a movie by mercurial performance and gallery artist Miranda July. That also means that Robert Dyne’s statement is not exactly a political critique. July doesn’t satirize greed; she exhibits the same privileged relationship to capitalism as most independent “artists” who scam their way through the grant and foundation system yet disdain the mundane workaday existence of others. It’s a peculiarly class-based, bohemian ideology that Kajillionaire expresses with a perfectly oddball plot — the dreaded heist movie taken to philosophical extremes.

July emphasizes perception over action. She explores feelings rather than deliver the big, empty con. Her approach to filmmaking is just as precious as in her 2005 feature debut You Me and Everyone We Know except that, here, she occasionally hits on moments of genuine emotional clarity that make her gimmicks seem to work. Each elaborated scheme — Old Dolio convincing her parents to fly to New York for a new fraud and the family’s encounter with Melanie (Gina Rodriquez), a young woman who adds her own eccentricity to theirs — applies another layer of perception, almost without artifice. The movie peaks when this sociopathic quartet prey upon an infirm senior by invading his home and then pretend to behave like a “normal” family.

This interlude, a gracefully timed pantomime in which Melanie plays piano and Old Dolio deals with her own confused emotions, feels improvised — like a moment in Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning. It simply observes a disturbingly complex situation. July gets her effect without asking us to congratulate her for concocting it. (Hipster reviewers who overpraise July are in the business of mutual admiration, not criticism.)

Coming from the art world where meanings are planted, July’s filmmaking feels deliberate yet awkward. The opening shot of the Dynes standing at an L.A. bus stop is premeditated, asking us to work through the image of urban oddity and anonymity; the following action of the Dynes’ near slapstick streetwalking climaxes with a small earthquake tremor. July stretches the idea of social and moral instability through a relay of extended metaphors. It would all be too obvious if not for the skill of her actors.

Jenkins, Winger, Wood, and Rodriguez humanize July’s ideas even after the story stops developing and we’ve already taken the bait and chewed over her points. Robert’s flustered male and Theresa’s skeptical wounded female appear to be cynical American parental types except that they’re untiring and, through the good performances, seem unjudged. Melanie’s contrasting life force also escapes judgment without her ethnic difference being idealized. But Old Dolio, the young daughter, bears the brunt of July’s art concept. Yet Wood perseveres imaginatively through every conceit. Her long, stringy, bum hair is like her mother’s, and Wood’s voice is even huskier than Winger’s, which indicates that Old Dolio’s forced sexual ambiguity comes from mistreatment as well as dysfunction. Wood sustains the character’s yearning as she struggles with awareness — her need to be nurtured.

And yet, Kajillionaire becomes wearisome. It appears at the wrong time: An art movie that denies the American thrall for “winning” but examines capitalism’s anxieties instead feels like a luxury amid the casualties of the COVID lockdown. Miranda July (not her real name) deserves that Neil Cassady line Nick Nolte spoke in Heart Beat: “I may not know what art is. But I know I don’t like it.”