Charlie McDowell’s lockdown project “Windfall” is a farcical comedy that attempts to have some bite about capitalism. Jason Segel plays a man known only as “Nobody,” who breaks into a billionaire’s empty vacation home near the Topatopa Mountains in Ojai, California. After puttering around the orange groves and sipping OJ by the pool, he snatches a few wads of cash from an office drawer and slips a new Rolex on his wrist. But this guy is no seasoned thief. He takes a leak in the shower, hurls his empty glass into the trees, and then remembers to wipe the door handles for prints. There is an absurd comedic charm to his incompetence, and it blossoms when “CEO” (Jesse Plemons) and “Wife” (Lily Collins) pull up to the house and become his hostages. But as the trio wait for the ransom to arrive, McDowell is less and less content to keep things light and comical and instead goes hunting for an allegory where there is none.
Segel’s Nobody remains a tabula rasa from start to finish—a man with no name, no family, and no apparent motivation. But unlike, say, Nicolas Cage in Michael Sarnoski’s “Pig,” his lack of identity does not give way to some deeper, mythical current. He remains flimsy and faceless—a void hiding behind a parable-ish name. And while this hollowness hardly matters in the early chase scenes in the orange groves, or when he clumsily negotiates a ransom deal, it proves critical to the film’s thematic collapse towards the end, when all the jokes have dried up. It’s frustrating, too, because Nobody gets the perfect opportunity to open up around the halfway mark. Wife joins him for a beer around the fire while CEO is fast asleep in a nearby cabin. She asks him, sympathetically, if the money is for someone else, perhaps for a wife or a loved one? He leans back, gives a wry grin, and takes the fifth again. And there goes the picture, and with it any nibbling criticism about wealth inequality in America.
While Segel and Collins wear out their characters fairly quickly, Plemons—who recently received his first Oscar nomination for his supporting role in “The Power of the Dog”—is endlessly compelling as both the arrogant, untouchable capitalist, and the petulant, hard-hearted husband. CEO is far less of a mystery than Nobody—and far more lively, too. He is a tech tycoon who made his billions writing an algorithm that slims down “bloated, fat companies,” often with significant job loss. For him, everything is an investment with a calculated risk, from economic policies to marital squabbles; feelings never come into the equation. In one of his most self-important and delusional episodes, he asks, “How can people be so mad at me? That’s like being mad at a clock. If you’re mad at a clock, that’s really on you. It’s not about the clock.” With a character so bluntly named, and a script so laden with platitudes—“Try being a rich white guy these days. It’s suck!”— Plemons does well to avoid falling into caricature. He frequently adds an amusing impotence to his kvetching and his self-congratulation; at one point he musters up the courage to confront Nobody, but just as soon as he’s standing up, he’s backing down, and with a snooty “Do you wanna be me?” to go with it.
Although it begins as a quiet comedy of errors, “Windfall” is primed to be bold and biting; it wants to talk about America, the greed of big business, and the rise of automation. In the end, however, as a kind of Hitchock-ian captive, home invasion thriller with supposed commentary, it has none of the slow dread or sadistic toying of Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games” or David Fincher’s “Panic Room.” Its blood spatter is turbulent and misdirected; its social commentary slapdash and confused. Giving out names like ‘Nobody,’ ‘CEO,’ ‘Wife,’ and ‘Gardener,’ McDowell demands to be heard with capital-I winking irony; but every time he gets the chance to say something meaningful, he shies away, falls for the easy line that rarely pays any substantial dividends. [C]