The Toddler Dad Movie Revue: 'IF'
We watched John Krasinski's Imaginary Friend (IF) movie because my son thought it had a grinch in it.
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A few weeks back, while scrolling through the home screens of various streaming services (a process that feels so constrained and mundane compared to browsing video store racks, if more convenient), my son (2.75 years old) seemed to perk up at the sight of the big fuzzy purple guy on the icon art for IF, John Krasinski’s family dramedy about imaginary friends.
“That one!” he said, and his excitement, mixed with my desire to watch something other than Cocomelon or Bad Dinosaurs for a change inspired me to pony up the $20 for the rental. At the last minute I opted to drop an additional five just to buy it, to avoid having to spend another $20 in case we couldn’t watch it within the 48-hour rental window (or if he liked it enough that he’d want to rewatch it 27 times, as he frequently does). This turned out to be the correct decision.
“Grinch… grinch…” my son kept muttering to himself during the buying process and all through the opening credits. He’d apparently decided that the big purple guy was some relative of the Grinch (he calls The Mandalorian “Yoda” and Baby Yoda “cat” and I prefer not to correct these enjoyable little misnomers. Plus I didn’t know what the big purple guy was actually called at that point. An “if?”).
He patiently made it through the whole opening credits sequence and the ensuing voiceover that begins the film in this state of anticipation. Only as soon as that ended, and it was clear that no grinches would be immediately forthcoming, he started to cry and demanded we watch something else. We ended up watching Bao, one of the Pixar shorts on Disney+, pretty much all of which he loves (personally I find the character design in Bao kind of grotesque, without the exception of the grandpa, who rules).
Fast-forward to about a week and a half later, when I was able to log onto my Prime account from a hotel in Bend, Oregon, when my son seemed to be in a much more forgiving mood vis-a-vis how soon grinches would appear. That his brother -- my stepson — was also watching with us, along with my wife, probably had something to with the longer attention span. This time he made it through about 40 or 50 minutes of rapt attention before he started jumping on his brother’s chest and trying to get me to play the game where I fill up my cheeks with air and he squishes them with his palm. “Do the Puffer Fish,” he’s taken calling it, with zero input from me. We didn’t finish watching IF in that sitting, but the next time we watched TV my son asked for “the purple guy.” I think we can call that a qualified success.
Toddler Rating: 6/10
As for what I thought of it, IF feels like a movie that has all the elements of a heartwarming family dramedy but never quite comes together. There’s so much care and thought that went into all these little elements of it even as it glosses right over the central themes and fundamentals of how this world actually works.
Our main character is Bea, played by Cailey Fleming, whose mom (Catharine Daddario) appears to us via flashback wearing a bandanna on her head, one of those movie shorthands that requires no elaboration (it’s right up there with specks of blood on a handkerchief). When the flashback ends, Bea is walking up the stairs of her grandmother’s Brooklyn Heights apartment, lips pursed, her dark eyes slightly bugged with fear and anticipation (a Spielberg Face-style expression the film will return to roughly 17 million times). It seems she’s staying with grandma while her dad (John Krasinski) has some kind of operation.
Soon we’re in the hospital. Krasinski’s character, it soon becomes clear, is the family goofball, doing a little dance with his IV bag (he’s put on it a mop head for hair and stick-on googly eyes) and asking the nurse for a double cheeseburger, goofing off to put his daughter’s mind at ease. Why he’s wearing a catalogue-ready cuddly sweater with perfect catalogue hair when he’s getting an IV put in, I have no idea. This is clearly not how pre-op works, how hospitals work, or how nurses, mops, googly eyes, or even IV bags work, but, like too-hale looking cancer patients, it’s mostly forgivable in a cute family dramedy.
More forgivable, certainly, than the part where we never find out what Krasinski’s character is actually in the hospital for, or what the operation he’s having is. I’m sorry, but when you’ve already introduced one dead parent, I’m going to need details on what’s wrong with the other one. Did they live downstream from a a teflon plant?
I also have a knee-jerk skepticism of Krasinski (who wrote and directed IF) for casting himself in the role of Super Dad whose presence lights up every room he’s in and immediately seduces every human within swooning distance (like the nurse, played by Liza Colón-Zayas from The Bear, who clearly can’t get enough of his shit). This brand of image management makes me wonder if he’s actually the kind of guy who throws phones at his assistants and keeps a torture room in his basement. Somehow he’s married to the delightful Emily Blunt, who gives the exact opposite vibe. Emily, blink twice if you’re in peril. (Certainly possible I’m misreading this, but those are the vibes).
Back at the apartment, Bea goes exploring and runs into the kooky upstairs neighbor, Cal, played by Ryan Reynolds, a charmingly sarcastic fella (aka a Ryan Reynolds type) who always seems to be wearing shirt sleeves and suspenders. The costume design is actually a competently conveyed, clearly telegraphed-yet-subtle foreshadowing of Cal’s true identity, which we will only learn later. Like I said, this is the odd film in which the little details are all in place, but the big picture is a mess.
Cal, we learn, like Bea, is capable of seeing other people’s imaginary friends — IFs, as they call themselves. As explained by a CGI Betty Boop-like pixie voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge (wonderful voice, that one). The other member of their little uptown magical realist triumvirate is Blue, the previously referenced giant purple fuzzy guy voiced by Steve Carell. He’s called “Blue,” we learn, because he was the imaginary friend of a colorblind kid. As a red-green colorblindness sufferer who also thought Blue was blue, I appreciated this touch.
Part of the reason Cal is so cynical, it turns out, is that he’s constantly beset by insecure IFs whose kids have all grown up and can’t see them anymore. As goes one’s child-like sense of wonder, so goes the big purple guy who isn’t so imaginary after all. The lost reveries of youth, personified, is a well-trodden narrative conceit of family dramedies, from Peter Pan to Toy Story. But it’s one that always hits me like a dagger to the gut, and that was true even before I could play make believe with the smiling toddler who will one day replace me. (Cards fully on the table here, I cried during Finding Neverland). Remember Bing Bong dying in Inside Out? He was the only good character. It’s a cliché, but it’s one that still plays.