Colin West’s “Linoleum” is the kind of movie that’s all but impossible to review with any specificity, because so much of its achievement lies in its surprises – how it seems to be doing one thing while slyly doing another, without deception, and then revealing its ultimate intentions with grace and style. This is the writer/director’s second film, and he displays a confidence and storytelling acumen that’s frankly inspiring.
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Jim Gaffigan stars as Cameron Edwin, a Bill Nye-type TV personality, but on a local (very local) level. He’s a middle-aged man on the verge of full-on crisis: his television show is about to be taken from him, and his wife Erin (Rhea Seehorn), once his enthusiastic co-host, is about to divorce him.
But strange things start happening. While dropping an application for astronaut training in a neighborhood mailbox, a sports car quite literally falls from the sky. He helps the driver out of the vehicle, and saves his life. (“You don’t believe me, do you?” he asks his incredulous spouse. “I don’t,” she replies, “it’s the falling from the sky part.”) Unfortunately, the man he saves is the one who has come to town to take his job; he is, insult to injury, an astronaut, and one who looks exactly like him. (Gaffigan plays both roles, beautifully.)
West seems to be setting up something along the lines of Dostoyevsky’s “The Double,” a story of a pushover watching his doppelganger march into his life and take it over. And there’s some of that here – no one really wants to grapple with the notion of meeting someone who is exactly like them but, y’know, better – but that, like many things in “Linoleum,” is a bit of a head-fake. The plot thickens when an ancient, discarded rocket falls from the sky into the Edwins’ back yard, reigniting something inside him. Maybe he could rebuild it himself. Maybe he could be an astronaut after all.
Meanwhile, Marc (Gabriel Rush), the son of his double – who has, of course, moved in directly across the street – begins a nervous friendship with Cameron’s daughter Nora (Katelyn Nacon). It’s not really an attraction, at least at first; he’s painfully shy, and she’s more into girls – but they’re drawn together because they’re both outsiders, and it grows from there. The relationship between these two teens, which could’ve been so simple and/or arbitrary, becomes a special thing, with rhythms and emotions that feel fresh. “I’m just… still figuring it out,” Nora shrugs. “Or whatever.”
“Linoleum” has a kind of dreamy, sunbaked quality, its characters moving through the greenery of the suburban streets as if weighed down by both the lives they’ve led, and the ones they know they’re heading towards. (The cinematographer is Ed Wu, and he’s one to watch.) Even the small roles are perfectly cast; both Michael Ian Black and Tony Shalhoub are playing characters they’ve done before, but never quite like this. And that same familiar-but-not quality extends to Gaffigan, who has quietly gone from one of our best stand-ups to one of our most reliable character actors. There’s a marvelous vulnerability to this performance, to how well he conveys the resigned quality of giving up and giving in at a certain age (“I’m constructing a DIY rocked out of a pile of Apollo garbage just to prove I’m worth a damn. I’m 50 years old. Is this what I’m supposed to be doing?”). West takes full advantage of the warmth and openness of the actor’s face, which turns out to be the most helpful special effect of the picture’s miraculous closing sequence.
Seehorn, who dazzles week after week on “Better Call Saul,” is unsurprisingly terrific – so believable, so in the moment – and the exhaustion she and Gaffigan manage to put across in a few short interactions tells us everything we need to know about the failure of this relationship. “Remember when we used to talk about doing something fantastic?” he asks, urgently. “Whatever happened to that?”
“It’s not that simple,” she replies. But maybe it is. The aerospace elements of “Linoleum” recall the homemade, Scotch-taped sci-fi vibe of “Safety Not Guaranteed” a few years back, and West’s climax lands with a similarly unexpected emotional resonance; it sneaks up on you, quietly, and then clobbers you. What a beautiful little movie. [A]
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