The “time-loop” comedy Palm Springs, lauded since its Sundance debut earlier this year, is a broad, anything goes gimmick with two likable actors in a movie that prizes contrived cleverness over all else, including honest laughs and its likable leads, who deserve a better picture. The elements for a good comedy are here, but the tone is calibrated so broad and pushy that you wish director Max Barbakow had dialed back the exaggeration to 11.
I love a good slapstick comedy: Airplane, Blazing Saddles, Caddyshack, There’s Something About Mary and even Chaplin’s Modern Times all models of form. But Palm Springs, a movie that posits a screaming bride knocking out her front teeth as a Big Joke, just isn’t as funny as it thinks it is.
Titular Palm Springs is the setting for a wedding whose guest include hapless Nyles (Samberg), his harpy girlfriend Misty (Meredith Hagner) and the bride’s disaffected sister and maid of honor, Sarah (Cristin Milioti). Wanting to be anywhere else, Nyles and Sarah desert the crass reception and meander to a nearby canyon where they stumble into a cave and are captured by an inexplicable energy source forcing them to relive the wedding day on repeat, and repeat, and repeat.
Thus begins the movie’s time loop device, Nyles and Sarah forced to spend countless days together figuring out how to break the cycle and ultimately sort out some life issues related to, in Sarah’s case, the inability to face up to some past mistakes (she’s a malcontent and former drug addict who happens to be the requisite black sheep daughter). Nyles eventually learns how to grow up and fall in genuine love, unlikely love. There’s a lot more plot, but that’s the basic gist.
The gimmick, which has been used to great effect in Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow, is that regardless of what changes Nyles and Sarah struggle to make, their days end up starting anew in the same place and time, here the morning of the wedding. This gives two opposites plenty of opportunities to attract, and a lot of space to do whatever suits them without fear of reprisal, because they can always correct today’s errors tomorrow.
Screenwriter Andy Siara has fun with his leads’ shifting points of view, and the overlapping paradoxes are sometimes intricate, and while Siara claims he hadn’t considered Harold Ramis’ 1993 prototype while crafting, it’s hard to understand how Palm Springs could exist without a debt, or nod, to its enduring predecessor.
There’s no arguing that Andy Samberg is a gifted satirist and comedian in search of a great movie role. Perhaps his most authentic performance to date was in 2012’s Celeste and Jesse Forever opposite Rashida Jones, a bittersweet tale of a complicated, evolving friendship. And Milioti, a veteran of Broadway’s Once and former nice girl on television’s How I Met Your Mother, is eminently watchable, by turns sardonic and refreshingly fractured. And there’s something topical in the zeitgeist of their dilemma, given the current monotony of staying at home while we long for a way to bust out of tedious repetition. Maybe all that matters when the chips are down, the movie says, is who is right in front of us – those we love.
Still, there isn’t much at stake here beyond the concept. Romantic comedy rules dictate that 1) opposites must repel until they attract, and 2) obstacles must emphatically derail lovebirds for ninety minutes before fate intervenes and they realize…what we all knew, all along. Will Nyles and Sarah learn some life lessons and break the time loop in time to realize they actually love each other? One guess, and it involves an exploding goat and a top-flight cast including Peter Gallagher as Sarah’s beleaguered father, June Squibb dispensing off-kilter humor and J.K. Simmons, stuck in the loop with the pair, going gonzo with a bow and arrow.
Palm Springs is inventive at times, and both performances are appealing, but the over-calibration and exaggeration of the comedy didn’t strike me as funny. It certainly can’t compare to Judd Apatow’s much better summer comedy, The King of Staten Island, which uses humor to get at something deeply truthful in the human condition. Samberg and Milioti endeavor toward the same, but their movie is just a put-on.
2 stars.
