Bea (Cailey Fleming) and Blue (voiced by Steve Carell) in IF.
Paramount Pictures
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Paramount Pictures
Bea (Cailey Fleming) and Blue (voiced by Steve Carell) in IF.
Paramount Pictures
The third installment in John Krasinski's blockbuster horror franchise A quiet place will soon deploy noise-activated monsters to scream-scare the public. But the filmmaker starts the summer with sweeter monsters – the sweetest ones, actually – in IF.
Which doesn't mean she kills 12-year-old Bea (Walking dead Cailey Fleming) to faint the first time she sees them, even though honestly she has a lot on her mind. Having already lost her mother to cancer, she moves in with her grandmother for a while while her father is in the hospital awaiting surgery.
Still, when should not encountering a giant stuffed animal in the apartment above be startling, even if he turns out to be a sweetheart voiced by Steve Carell? It is an imaginary friend (an 'ALS' in his parlance) of a child who has long forgotten him – and who, because he was color blind, called him 'Blue', even though he is purple.
Also up there is Blossom (voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge), a life-size ballerina doll, and the apartment's troubled resident, Cal (Ryan Reynolds), the only person besides Bea who seems to be able to see IFs.
Bea tries to be very mature for her father, played by director Krasinski. When she visits him in the hospital, he starts dancing with his IV pole and making jokes, and she has to tell him to dial things back a bit. As the film progresses, you might be tempted to repeat that regarding his direction, but things certainly liven up when the IFs explain that they've started a matchmaking agency to help fellow imaginary friends find new kids. Bea volunteers to help and soon meets a bunch of critters—unicorns, dragons, and even a flaming marshmallow—at an IF retirement home on Coney Island.
All this gives Krasinski an excuse to enlist an army of digital animators, first to bring to life imaginary critters voiced by his famous Hollywood friends, including George Clooney, Awkwafina, Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Jon Stewart, Steve Carell, and the late Lou Gossett Jr. in a warmly fatherly turn as a supervising teddy bear. And then to have the walls and floors of the retirement home change and flip as if they were just so many pixels.
At that point, if you're like me, you might start wanting something sturdier to hold on to, like say, a plot that holds up, or even that just stands still. This one jumps around much like the IFs themselves, first pairing them with new children, and then with their now adult original children, with little logic and less explanation.
Along the way, some intriguing issues are raised: about wanting to return to childhood, about growing out of childhood and about dealing with loss.
But usually the filmmakers take a detour, decorate and digitize their story instead of telling it, and that doesn't go well together with the stuff of the real world – Dad's surgery, for example, and Bea wandering around Brooklyn without her grandmother seeming to notice. And yes, I know: IF is a children's film, but still needs grounding. We're in Brooklyn, not Willy Wonkaland.
Even despite star voices and digital wizardry, IF's IFs feel generic, especially when they steal the focus from the live performers. Grandma, for example. No filmmaker who has actress Fiona Shaw on screen needs special effects.
Krasinski clearly knows that. He has created a beautiful moment in which Bea puts a ballet record – the 'Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia' – on the turntable, and Grandma stands listening to it, bathed in the twilight in front of a window, with her back to the camera. She remembers the dancer she was as a child, and as the music rises, so does her right hand… just so. And in that beautiful, casual gesture you realize what Krasinski's sweet childhood film could have been… IF only.
