Kajillionaire review – Miranda July finds lightning in the everyday

There are heist movies, there are family portraits, there are funny stories and there are love stories. But then there’s Miranda July’s Kajillionaire, which is all of these things and none of them at once. In her latest film, the incomparable auteur looks at a nuclear family-cum-business team with a curious, almost ingenuous eye to explore our animal instincts: what feels tender, successful, joyful, and how we learn to live with it all.

“Most people want to be kajillionaires,” explains Robert (Richard Jenkins) to his wife Theresa (Debra Winger) and their daughter Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood). It’s not a question or an explanation – it’s the simple fact that enlivens their family unit. These people might be bound by their DNA, their flesh and bones and hair and fingernails, but beyond that immutable truth there seems to be nothing intuitive about them. Can somebody really love you if they don’t know how?

Old Dolio attends parenting classes to better understand what she, the child, might be missing. They split everything three ways because that's how it's always been, but Theresa can’t make her daughter pancakes, she can’t wrap up little birthday presents with ribbons. These parents simply can’t be the people Old Dolio wants them to be. It’s only with the arrival of Melanie (Gina Rodriguez), an incandescent stranger who cracks the family’s world open, that this young woman realises the world might have a lot more love to give.

Writer-director July builds her world with pin-sharp dialogue and microscopic body language that has the effect of making you feel like a puppet on her strings, tugged whichever way she chooses. This world seems to exist ever so slightly parallel to ours – Old Dolio’s voice is a little lower, her hair a little longer, her family a little more unusual – but the whole thing is so beguiling you won't want to leave.

It’s a world coloured with soap bubbles of marshmallow pink, which leak through the walls of the office space that our family rent as a kind of “home.” A world in which a dream-like music score, courtesy of composer du jour Emile Mosseri (from The Last Black Man in San Francisco to this, no one is currently doing it better), flows in and out with the elegance of an old Hollywood romance, while still keeping a contemporary story grounded in the present.

There is adrenaline in his music, raising the stakes of these characters’ cons and crimes – more specifically the criminal damage that people do to each other. The way that love can be transactional, the way that family can feel impossible. There is a low-level neurosis coursing through these lives that makes the viewer laugh, but which ultimately ends in heartbreak. This is the rare talent of Miranda July: she whisks you up in a sweet world of airy, dreamy design, and drops you from 10,000 feet before you have time to process how her devastating understanding of loneliness has shattered you into a million pieces.

Old Dolio and Melanie learn from one another, they catch each other off guard, they remember that desire is just as precious as urgency. If you think you know anything about birth, theft, affection, equality, death and dreams, think again: this film is here to remind you that such things happen every single day, to all of us. “We can only ever be how we are,” Robert tells his daughter. After stealing so much he realises he still has so little. You can work your way into anything – even into being a kajillionaire. To learn how to truly care for another person, though? That's not so easy. But Kajillionaire reminds you that it’s always, always worth trying.

Kajillionaire is in cinemas from October 9.