If I could go back to when I was in a coma and you were just a newborn baby, I would hold you in my hand — that’s how small you were, you would just fit in my one hand — and tell you that your Dad was going to be okay. I would give you presence where there was none. Where your dad was laid out in a coma, I would go back and be there. If I could go back and haunt us, as a ghostly presence, I would be there for your first months of life. And show you that your Dad is okay, will be okay, that you will be okay, and reassure you that you would not enter life with the loss, of presence or permanence, of your Dad who loves you more than his entire world and anything else he has ever known. I’d go back and experience your first two months of life, the ones that I missed in the hospital, and, even if you could not understand as a baby exactly what was happening, I would give you something easier to understand: your Dad alive and well, holding you, saying it would be okay. I would wake myself up from the reverie of this coma, I would hold my little girl and tell her it would not be the last time she cuddled with her Dad. That there would be more days, more months, and more years and more of your Dad. If I could go back, and float within that room and embody for you some Imaginary Friend who would tell you it would all be okay, I’d go and do that.
IF is a movie about heartbreak and mending ourselves back together. When John Krasinski directed A Quiet Place (2018), we collectively might’ve thought that we didn’t know he had it in him. When John Krasinski directs IF, we are not so perplexed, and your parasocial relationship with old “Jim from The Office” can be squared away and harmonized with the wholesome Family Movie he has produced. That’s good, because it ensures that he can do something outside the scope of horror. That’s valuable practice. Any good director can do both terrifying horror and entertainment for the whole family. They don’t have to, but if they’re good, they can. John Krasinski does seem to be decent at the gig.
What you can take away from the John Krasinski movies so far is that he is competent with actors. It is not just that his wife, Emily Blunt, is good at working with anyone; we already know that she is. It seems like John Krasinski has a good handle on getting performers to key into the material he wants to direct. The way we can tell that’s true in IF is how the actors operate next to computer-animated characters. It’s because of good guidance and good blocking that, while it looks pretty flimsy art-wise, you don’t really strain against the idea of these imaginative creatures co-existing in a world alongside our human characters.
What happens in the movie is that Bea (Cailey Fleming)’s Dad (John Krasinski) is hospitalized with heartbreak. His wife has passed away and they are left to pick up the pieces. It’s tear-jerking stuff yet toes the line of manipulation by feeling genuine and authentic in its emotions. Like many kids faced with trauma, Bea disassociates and floats into an imaginary world, wherein Cal (Ryan Reynolds) is like the Walt Disney of the Imagined World, casting to life all kinds of fun and cute creatures who will keep children company, until they grow into adulthood and forget how to use their imaginations.
Then the movie must do the obvious thing, but sometimes the obvious thing is the right thing to do, and that’s why it’s obvious. IF then must reconnect our adult lives with our childhoods. Right out of the Pixar playbook, the concept sits cozily between Monsters Inc. (2001) and Inside Out (2016), and by being both of these things at once, manages to feel new enough to justify the movie under it. Helpfully, the cast of voice actors for the creatures is punching way above the weight of what the material demands, enlisting the talents of: Steve Carrell; Phoebe Waller-Bridge; Louis Gosset Jr.; Emily Blunt; Matt Damon; Awkwafina; and Jon Stewart. That’s more than the movie needs, for sure, but this is also why John Krasinski can overachieve even in a more limited mode than horror; he has all the right friends.
If there’s a bugbear about this movie, it’s that the movie is way too long. Too long for a family movie, but more importantly, too long for its premise, which is clear and obvious from the start and then does what you expect. In that regard, the movie is an even more limited success. That means it’s safe for any family, who will get exactly what they want from watching it, but will not produce that many surprises for anyone in the family. There is some cleverness, here and there, and enough laughs to call it a successfully funny movie, but there’s also a limitation in the computer-animated presentation, in that it has the problem all of these movies have: of creating actual presence of character for the computer-created characters. Are they real in this space? Thankfully, the whole concept is that they may or may not be, but that’s one way the movie gets away with not fully convincing us that the characters exist in these spaces.
At the end of the movie, my daughter turned to me, and said, “Dad, you have raindrops,” her word for tears, and I nodded and wiped away my eyes, and looked over at her, and then started crying fully. Ugly crying. I held her tight, just the way I would if I could go back and hold her as a baby, and tell her everything would be okay. Then, she did something I will always remember. She held my hand and squeezed it and looked at me, and her eyes told me that now she knew it was okay. I am okay. She is okay. We do not even have to imagine, we’re both here, alive, and together.