Miranda and Charlie stake out a Costco for buried treasure in "King of California."
(Mike Cahill, 2007)
August 3, 2011
by Joel Crary
If there’s any treasure buried in California, chances are it’s long been paved over. That’s what “King of California” presupposes. It adds the funny idea that such treasure would be buried under, say, a Costco, and features an off-the-wall third act in which treasure hunters break into said Costco and jackhammer away at the floor underneath a skid of bulk foodstuffs to get at it. Back in college, I bought my first television set at a Costco along with boxes of chocolate bars and more than what would constitute a sane amount of mustard. Those places have everything.
The movie is an idea in search of a plot. Writer/director Mike Cahill tacks one in place: he makes his treasure hunter a negligent father named Charlie (Michael Douglas), freshly released from a mental hospital. Charlie’s 16-year-old daughter Miranda (Evan Rachel Wood) has been living alone in their house for a time, paying the bills with a job at McDonald’s, unaware that she’s on a third mortgage. She’s gotten away with this by convincing all concerned potential guardians that she’s living with someone else.
We learn via flashbacks that Charlie was the kind of dad who would outfit Miranda’s science projects with political statements. His wife was a hand model who clenched her bags in her childlike grip and took off, leaving Miranda to be raised in Charlie’s glorified jazz hall of a California suburban home. “He pawned his bass and vowed never to pawn it again once he got it back,” she explains. An old friend from the band (Willis Burks II) shows up with an instrument in one hand and a joint in the other, quietly desperate to keep old times alive. “I don’t do that anymore,” Charlie says, having moved on to Spanish lessons and the finer points of metal detector tones.
It’s unclear where Charlie’s craziness begins and ends. Once he’s sprung from the sanitarium, he shows signs that he hasn’t fully recovered. From what, exactly? One flashback shows him swinging violently by the neck from a chandelier, his daughter coming to his rescue with a butcher knife. “Time to ride the bipolar pony,” Miranda intones sarcastically in voiceover. It gradually comes to light that whilst in the sanitarium, Charlie discovered the approximate whereabouts of a nearby treasure left behind by a fictional explorer named Father Juan Florismarte Torres. Now free, he obsesses over his GPS and wanders the grounds of a local Applebee’s with lunatic intent.
Douglas is a terrific actor, and a big coup for the filmmakers. Sporting a scraggly beard and unkempt hair, he seems miles away from his subtle performance in “Wonder Boys,” delivering feverish declarations of “Eureka!” over an unearthed doubloon without a scrap of irony. Wood holds up her end and effectively shifts gears as Miranda is drawn into indulging her father, we suspect, simply for the quality time it affords them. Both do what they can with the material, which requires them to be products of a collection of dark and unlikely eccentricities.
The film misses the mark in playing Charlie’s mental illness for anything other than laughs, and the first two acts come off as excessively cute in their efforts to find pathos in Charlie and Miranda’s relationship. The stories about the bass, the science project, and the hand-modelling mother are all disparate elements Cahill brings together in order to create the impression of a dysfunctional back story, but they’re a bit too quirky to gel into anything honest. Letting Miranda serve as narrator is a misfire, too, even if it’s meant to portray her as the sane one. It’s invariably hard for young characters to carry off that kind of authority. They have some growing up to do, after all.
Eventually, father and daughter stage their grand warehouse sting, and the movie finally picks up. I enjoy it when a film makes the most of available resources. One of my favourite stories from the world of independent cinema is “El Mariachi” coming out of Robert Rodriguez having access to a guitar, a bus, and a turtle. Cahill has a scuba suit, a jackhammer, and a Costco, and he puts them to inventive use. If only there were a more solid story to go along with it.
