Edition 40 | 2021
Review:
Kajillionaire (2020)
Words Jacob Horrocks
In 1721, a Scottish woman named Maggie Dickson was hung for the crime of concealing a pregnancy. Declared to be dead, her body was placed in a wooden coffin, and was carted to the churchyard. On the way to her burial, she woke up and the law determined that she had fulfilled her sentence. She would live another 40 years as Half-hangit Maggie... Kajillionaire was released in 2020, as the third film directed by acclaimed filmmaker, Miranda July. It stars Evan Rachel Wood, Richard Jenkins, Debra Winger and Gina Rodriguez as a family of grifters, living it tough in Los Angeles. They skim what they need, they worry about “The Big One”, and they adhere their lives to a self-evident code: the modern way of things is not working. Last year, in Australia, the national gender pay gap sat at 13.4% amidst a “gender apathy” and seems unlikely to close for another 26 years. This is a real imbalance, and these are historical crimes. We are amid a post-scarcity, post-gender world, but still, we fear that we will not have enough, or will have less than our neighbour. Kajillionaire does not unburden these imbalances in the world, but it does place itself in their orbit, separated from the boulevards of other arthouse, LAbased capers like Drive or Ingrid Goes West. Instead, it is a potent discovery of the pressures of being a father in a female family, of being a mother immune to human touch, and of being a daughter longing to know them both. It is forthcoming with a modern strain of existentialism, where its characters must form their own individual meanings. Death seems to be inescapable, but a deserving ending. It is simple, but significant, and a film I have thought about for close to a year now. As with July’s other works, Kajillionaire is very twee, quirky, and delightfully sincere. Her perceptiveness and creative concerns here are original, and honest. The setting of Los Angeles experiences small earthquakes that roll across the landscape, tremors that rock storefronts and airports and gas stations. Yet to pay attention through cinematographer Sebastian Winterø’s lens to the extras and background characters, you would not know they were occurring, suggesting they are far more internalised. The film’s score by Emile Mosseri fluctuates between vulnerable and
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