“Wish I Was Here”
Directed by Zach Braff
Starring Zach Braff, Kate Hudson, Mandy Patinkin, Josh Gad, Ashley Greene, Joey King, Pierce Gagnon
114 Mins

Great music can’t bandaid uber depressing bummertown that sees Mandy Patkinson slowly dying, a breadwinning wife privy to gross sexual harassment at work, and an out-of-work/failed actor in director/writer/star Zach Braff. With virtually ever b-plot revolving around a different cause for concern, Wish I Was Here is occasionally profound but always deathly dour.

Even Braff’s movie children are saturated with their own “quirky” issues. Daughter Grace (Joey King) is borderline addicted to her Jewish faith, a strange and slightly off-putting trait to see in a young girl circa 2014, while son Tucker (Pierce Gagnon) rocks a bit of an apathy problem – a generational malaise that reveals Braff’s sweeping pessimism for future generations. Tucker naps in class, monkeying around under the hot breath of Jewish academia, and generally seems disinterested in all. But he’s 10 or something so I guess we’re supposed to cut him, and by extension Braff, a break when his arc never goes anywhere.

For how much of a milk farm Wish I Was Here turns into, the film starts on promising ground with a great opening bit that’s unorthodox, meta, and entirely intriguing. We’re immediately invested and he smartly slips into some snarky comedy that gets the laughs rolling fast and loose. Without provocation, the film sputters and nosedives when it drops the c-bomb on us. Cancer. Another fucking movie about cancer.

And though many will say that calling this a movie about cancer is reductive – that it’s a movie about confronting your fears, particularly the fear of losing the ones you love or the fear of giving up on your dreams – everything in this movie is a cancer. Aidan’s faltering career is a cancer. Sarah’s cubicle co-inhibitor is a cancer. The cancer eating away at Saul (and yes, Patkinson is named Saul) is a cancer. So even if you don’t consider this a “cancer movie,” cancer is the only catalytic backbone driving the film forward.

The chief issue is, when you already have cancer rolling around bringing everything down, there’s just no need for all this other glumness. If the center of the film is dark and dreary, you need to lighten things up around the edges. Even the moments of levity are stained with Braff’s strangely caustic musings – Scrubs alum Donal Faison is slipped in for a quick scene where Aidan passes his daughter off as dying of cancer so he can test drive a cool car. My jaw dropped. More cancer? How original. There’s nothing funny here. It’s just down for the sake of being down.

Braff wrote the script over the course of a year, collaborating with brother Adam Braff. Once they wrapped up the script, there was little to no interest from the studios. So to finance this passion project of theirs, Braff and Braff notoroiously went to Kickstarter where they would raise 3.1 million dollars, a million over their goal. And while this Kickstarter phenomenon will surely go down in history as further changing the antiquated ways of studio control and proving the efficacy of crowd sourcing, that’s likely all that Wish I Was Here will be remembered for.

Ultimately mawkish and bittersweet, Wish You Were Here is second-rate meditation on phoenix cycle that’s virtually guaranteed to drag you by the heels into a depressive state.