Wish I Was Here Review

Film is an incredible tool to convey any kind of story you can imagine. Perhaps you want to create an exhilarating story about six superheroes defending New York? Or how about a beautiful yarn about Joaquin Phoenix falling in love with a piece of artificial intelligence? Zach Braff, in his second directorial effort, acts like he's saying something truly masterful and thoughtful in every single second of Wish I Was Here. But instead of making the production feel insightful, it just makes sure every moment is laced with arrogance.

Zach Braff and his brother, Adam Braff, put together the script for this movie, and good Lord is that thing wretched. The screenplay has this constant desire to make sure every piece of dialogue a character utters is this witticism that's supposed to be meaningful beyond belief. Honestly though, they're just clunky, since most of them are delivered through Zach Braff, who also stars in this project, or should I say "Star", since very little noticeable acting is given in his performance. Braff pretty much acts like a sarcastic know-it-all for the entire movie, and instead of being endearing or revealing something deeper about the character, this attitude is simply grating.

As the painfully bad introspective lines pile up (My personal favorite has to be the line "You know what the problem with hiding in a fishbowl is? Everyone can see you"), the other main flaw of the movie crops up; its unending supply of characters defined by cliches and not personalities. The younger male brothers only a brat, the older daughter wants to be her own person (by the by, these have got to be the most annoying cinema kids in recent memory), Braffs brother, played by Josh Gad, is a schlub and the wife just wants more out of life. Perhaps simply being cliches wouldn't be such a problem if these people were at least interesting, or the circumstances they were trapped in were at all engrossing. Instead, tedium awaits any audience member upon Braff wondering for the umpteenth time what life truly means.

Weirdly, while he strikes out in writing and acting, Braff actually does alright in the area of directing. It's not exemplary or anything, but there's some shots that are nice enough to look at, with one or two having some thoughtful examples of having color emphasize a scenes mood. There's even a visual gag involving a lack of pamphlets that showed a dash of cleverness. That doesn't excuse moments so tonally inconsistent they're almost mesmerizing in their failure, namely a moment where Braff realizes his dad is truly about to die, which is followed up by a rabbi getting on a segway and then running into a wall. What the hell guys? Maybe, just maybe, this kind of unexpected slapstick detour could have worked, but in the middle of this otherwise dramatic scene, its just a failure.

I'd say the only moment in the film that's actually fully successful is one that comes toward the very end, involving an emotional moment involving Josh Gads character. On the phone with his niece, he notes how scared he is, how losing his mom was so hard and how he doesn't want to through that again with his father. For the first time in this entire trainwreck, a character talks like a person and displays emotion that doesn't feel forced. By contrast, the rest of this slipshod mess just gets even worse, but at least in that single fleeting bit Braff conveys something other than appalling failure.