Perhaps I shouldn’t poke holes in a movie that’s primary objective is to entertain children, and the bright characters will probably be enough to win them over. Krasinski wears his heart on his sleeve and is commendable for trying to use his street cred to make a movie about finding the joys and wonders of what life has to offer. If only it added up to anything even remotely coherent. Returning to her grandmother’s building, Bea goes to thank Cal only to discover that the door to his apartment opens into an old storage room as revealed by the landlady. After her dad is released from the hospital, he and Bea pack up to go home. During this, Bea realizes from an old picture she painted that Cal is actually her own IF, whom she had forgotten after her mother’s death.
Combining live-action and animation, the film follows a young girl (Fleming) who goes through a difficult experience and begins to see everyone’s imaginary friends who have been left behind as their real-life children have grown up. One night, while Grandma is falling asleep watching an old movie (it’s “Harvey,” which is a big tipoff for those who know it), Bea hears something upstairs in the apartment building. She investigates, and finds Calvin (Ryan Reynolds), who we learn is the reluctant caregiver to all the imaginary friends who have been left behind when their kids grew up and forgot about them. Bea offers to help Calvin and the imaginary friends (or IFs for short) by either finding them new kids — like Benjamin (Alan Kim, from “Minari”), another patient in the hospital — or reuniting them with the adults who used to be their kids.
Following a tip, Bea, Cal, and Blue find Blue’s original kid Jeremy, now a grown man trying to launch a business. With top 10 movies Bea’s help Jeremy remembers Blue, who gives him the confidence he needs for a business presentation.
So, while Dad’s in the hospital, Bea stays with her grandma. Bea sets out to write a story to share with her dad while he’s in the hospital, but she gets sidetracked with a new job. On one hand, you have to give some credit to writer-director John Krasinski for using his first picture deal with a major studio to churn out a big-budgeted, original PG movie for struggling theaters. Once upon a time, these films came out every other week and could be relied upon to make a decent chunk of change, but in the age of streaming that content pipeline has since dwindled. So while I root for “IF” and its hopeful commercial success, the final product is a classic example of a movie that provokes more questions than answers.
However, he still handles the idea with an impressive amount of heart and enthusiasm. In the meantime, Bea stays with her equally effervescent grandmother (Fiona Shaw, one of the film’s highlights) at her old, creaky apartment building. You see, he’s been running a kind of matchmaking service for IFs whose kids have stopped believing in them; once they do, you usually get put out to pasture in a kind of pastel retirement home. Bea, eager for something to do (and believe in), sets herself to the task of helping Calvin save the IFs by giving them someone to believe in them. The biggest surprise from a performance perspective is Ryan Reynolds, though.
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As Bea’s stoic nature starts to crack and give way to the youthful joy she so desperately needs, Fleming perfectly captures each beat of her arc. It would’ve been simple for Krasinski, who also wrote the movie, to create an action-packed adventure wherein Bea must race against time to save IFs from disappearing. Instead, Krasinski expands the IFs’ world through whimsical montages and poignant scenes rooted in nostalgia. For the former, there’s a delightful sequence where Bea transforms a retirement home housing various displaced IFs to be whatever she wants it to be, much to Cal’s chagrin, which allows Krasinski the opportunity to let his creativity fly. She’s 12, but she’s played by 17-year-old Cailey Fleming; she’s collected a lot of acting chops from all those Walking Dead episodes.
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The home’s teddy bear proprietor (the late Louis Gossett Jr.) is delighted that Bea is taking an interest and encourages her to not only put her best foot forward but push Cal to step up his game as well. Between this and A Quiet Place, John Krasinski is showing a really strong aptitude as a director for tapping into the relationships between parents and kids. The basic plot of the movie is that John Krasinski and his 12-year old daughter are in New York so he can go to the hospital and she can stay with her grandma. Mom died at some point previous to this but a flashback sequence shows them to be a very happy family.
After returning to her grandmother’s apartment, Bea spots an odd little figure fliting in and around the building’s shadows. But when getting closer, she realizes this person looks like a 1930s cartoon version of an anthropomorphized butterfly. While imagination was very much part of the storyline, it was also very much part of the movie-making process. Krasinski helped the actors move past the logistical challenges of interacting with characters that were physically not in the scene by shooting some scenes using puppets and stuffed animals. Kids will no doubt be drawn to the live-action animated IF’s, particularly “Blue,” voiced by Steve Carell, and each fantastical creature Krasinski created with their own unique backstory and charm.
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The scene to watch out for happens out of nowhere – she comes back home from one of her visits with the imaginary friends to find grandma waiting for her, because they have to go to the hospital RIGHT NOW. Krasinski emphasizes poignancy over coherence, with composer Michael Giacchino wildly overscoring the piece in order to convey narrative beats that simply aren’t there. The film looks great, with rich, vintage production design by Jess Gonchor, and it’s beautifully shot by Steven Spielberg’s master cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. But the whole conceit is so undercooked, it could give you salmonella. At the hospital, Bea tells her father a story about how she was pushing herself to act like a grown-up when she is just a child who still needs her father.
Her resolve of no longer being a kid anymore falls as she embraces childhood, the beauty that comes with imagination and she realizes she doesn’t need to go through life alone. For the most part, John Krasinski’s screenplay is solid. However, it paints an odd picture of the characters’ lives before the film’s main events kick off. Bea was seemingly separated from her father with no further context as to why a child was left on their own or where they lived previously. Now, this is not information that is completely necessary for the plot’s progression.
He tells her to go on out and “explore her own story” while she’s here. The PG rating makes sense given some of the film’s themes, but the animated creatures’ wholesome nature and their adventure makes it really digestible for young children to understand. The following day, Bea goes to visit her father in the hospital, only for Blue to be walking around the place. Bea tries to get him out of there, as she knows people will look at her funny if they see her talking to someone that isn’t visible to anyone else.
While director John Krasinski has directed other films — most notably “A Quiet Place” — “IF” is “his most personal project to date,” according to CBS News. That will likely be the primary content concern for many families. And we get a couple of winking gags about “naked” fruit characters that might cause a parent to roll his or her eyes. There’s something refreshingly lovely about a family-focused film that doesn’t choose to jump through the same old problematic hoops. While visiting the IFs, Bea and Cal walk in on an IF art class that’s painting an IF “model.” The apple-with-stick-legs IF quickly grabs a towel to cover it’s “nakedness.” Cal tells a banana-like IF to put on some pants. “You’re freaking everybody out,” Cal says as the embarrassed IF covers its lower banana extremities.
He’s the kind of all-American aw-shucks new dad who dipped his toe into the horror genre, and now wants to make a fun movie that his children can watch. He’s a guy named Cal, one of Bea’s friends who’s also deeply familiar with imaginary friends. IF is teed up as a tale about the power of imagination, but it plays like a movie struggling mightily to create new movie magic moments. The kind of moments that show up in highlight reels celebrating the magic of film. The two get to work trying to find new children for the IFs, but are new children really the answer? It might be that what the IFs really need is to reconnect with their old children, despite them now being, well, old.