Palm Springs: A cheeky nightmare

Palm Springs (2020) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for sexual content, brief violence, drug use and relentless profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.31.20

Some films shouldn’t be discussed ahead of time, because so much of the joy comes from being caught off-guard by the unexpected twists, turns and sidebar surprises orchestrated by an audaciously clever writer and director.

With nothing to do until the wedding ceremony begins in a few hours, Sarah (Cristin Milioti)
and Nyles (Andy Samberg) enjoy some quality time ... in a pool belonging to folks who
are out of town.

That’s definitely the case with this snarky rom-com, available via Hulu. Director Max Barbakow and writer Andy Siara play us like a fiddle. Considering this is the feature debut for both, that result is even more impressive.

So I’m inclined to simply say, Check it out; you’ll have a lot of fun — allowing for a tad too many F-bombs — and leave it at that. Because I can’t really say anything else, without giving too much away.

Still with me?

Okay then: On your head be it.

Barbakow and Siara open on a goat. Somewhere in the desert. 

It’ll be an important goat.

Elsewhere, Nyles (Andy Samberg) wakens to the petulant whine of Misty (Meredith Hagner), his self-centered Girlfriend From Hell. They’re in Palm Springs for the destination wedding of friends Tala and Abe (Camila Mendes and Tyler Hoechlin), taking place later this day at a fancy desert resort.

Nyles seems to subsist on beer and burritos; he has the scruffy, apathetic attitude of a failure-to-launch. Even so, his casual indifference — as the day proceeds — seems unnecessarily boorish. Couple this behavior with considerable vulgarity and profanity, and it feels like we’ve wandered into an aggressively crude Seth Rogen comedy.

Not so; just be patient.

Evening falls; the ceremony concludes; the microphone is passed around. Misty’s toast is absolutely ghastly and tone-deaf. The bride’s parents — Howard and Pia (Peter Gallagher and Jacquiline Obradors) — pass the baton to Tala’s older sister Sarah (Cristin Milioti), maid of honor and, one would expect, next to speak. But Sarah, tongue-tied and terrified — having consumed perhaps a few too many glasses of wine — stands silently, like a deer in headlights.

Enter Nyles, who snatches the microphone and saves the moment with a truly terrific speech. (Who’d have thought?)

Hello, My Name Is Doris: A woman worth knowing

Hello, My Name Is Doris (2015) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.1.16

Sally Field remains cute as a bug: as personable and effervescent as she was back in 1965, when she debuted as television’s Gidget.

Decked out in a wildly inappropriate, hot-neon-yellow '80s-era jumpsuit in order to "fit in"
with the modern millennial nightclub crowd, Doris (Sally Field, center) does her best to
impress John (Max Greenfield, third from left) and the rest of their hipster entourage.

The difference, all these years later, is that she also has matured into a deceptively powerful actress. Too many people take the bubbly exterior for granted — the signature cheerfulness — and then act surprised when Field unleashes impressive layers of pathos or expressive intensity.

We shouldn’t be surprised; her dramatic chops have been well established ever since Norma Rae and Places in the Heart, and subsequently well exercised in Steel Magnolias, a well-remembered guest appearance on TV’s E.R., and 2013’s Oscar-nominated supporting role in Lincoln.

Given the right material, Field can be a force of nature ... and Hello, My Name Is Doris definitely is the right material.

Director Michael Showalter’s bittersweet dramedy has been expanded from Doris and the Intern, an 8-minute short by then film student Laura Terruso, who shared her work with Showalter while he was teaching at her alma mater, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Obviously impressed, he and Terruso began a scripting collaboration that has resulted in this feature film: a clever and sensitive expansion of what began as little more than a droll comedy.

(Terruso’s short is readily available for online viewing: an opportunity I strongly encourage ... but only after you’ve seen this feature.)

We meet Doris Miller (Field), a “woman of a certain age,” during her all-time worst personal crisis. Her mother has just died, after having been “monitored” full-time by Doris, who put her own life on hold in the process. We get hints that Mom was something of a shut-in with a “clutter habit,” both traits having been absorbed, more or less, by Doris.

With Mom barely in the grave, Doris’ insensitive brother Todd (Stephen Root) and his mean-spirited wife Cynthia (Wendi McLendon-Covey, the pluperfect shrew) are anxious for Doris to sell the Staten Island house in which she was raised, and has spent all that effort as a full-time caregiver. Todd and Cynthia wish to reap the financial windfall.

Doris panics at the thought: What Cynthia dismisses as the home’s mountains of junk, Doris regards as a “museum” of accumulated memories shared with her late mother. As with most hoarders, Doris simply refuses to acknowledge any sort of problem.

More to the point, she’s suddenly adrift — answerable to nobody but herself — and utterly baffled by how to put that first self-indulgent foot forward.