If, the new kids comedy from John Krasinski, has all the elements of a family friendly hit: a healthy dose of sentimentality, a heavy emphasis on the power of a child’s imagination and a prerequisite of tragedy undergirding on a girl’s journey. Also, an expensive mix of live-action and animation and an all-star cast of voice actors – among them, George Clooney, Jon Stewart, Amy Schumer, Bradley Cooper, Maya Rudolph and Krasinski’s wife, Emily Blunt – playing a roster of Imaginary Friends (Ifs) forgotten by their grown-up creators and companions.
On paper, Krasinski’s first kids film as a writer-director checks the boxes, though in practice it’s not quite as cuddly as Blue, the giant purple bear hug of an If hammily voiced by Steve Carell, looks. There’s an underlying, perfunctory sweetness to this tale of a girl who, in the midst of family turmoil, can suddenly see everyone’s former imaginary friends. But If doesn’t fully conjure the magic that has elevated such family classics featuring sentient non-human companions as Toy Story 3 and Paddington 2.
Still, there are plenty of wacky, cartoon-esque bits for the kids. And for adults prone to childhood nostalgia, there’s something winning and throat-achey to the premise of a retirement home of Ifs pining the loss of their grown human friends and waiting to find another child playmate. Or even just slightly older former friends, as 12-year-old Bea, capably played by Cailey Fleming, declares she’s no longer a kid and thus too old for games. The film opens with mock-camcorder footage of Bea’s earlier, happier days in a playhouse of a Brooklyn apartment – a fantasy of a happy family of three making believe, before and during her mom’s (Catharine Daddario) cancer.
In the present and back in New York after time away, her father (Krasinski, channeling a distilled, sillier version of Jim Halpert) has returned to the dreaded hospital room to await surgery for a “broken heart”, because this poor child has apparently not been through enough. Left to fend for herself with minimal supervision from her dad’s empathetic nurse (an underused Liza Colón-Zayas) and her sweet yet clueless grandmother (Fiona Shaw) – every character real or imaginary here is just doing their best – Bea encounters a strange man upstairs named Cal (Ryan Reynolds, acting very true to form, for better or for worse), who runs a struggling If placement agency out of an emporium of treasures with Blue and a Minnie Mouse-cum-Bee Movie creature named Blossom (Phoebe Waller-Bridge). Skeptical of the Ifs but moved by their sincere affection and plight – especially after a trip to their Memory Lane retirement home beneath Coney Island, a conceit aiming for the parents – Bea signs on for the agency’s new mission: to reconnect the forgotten Ifs with the inner children of stressed and pressed adults in New York.
Krasinski is, by this point, a proven film-maker, and the admittedly convoluted plot with some waving loose ends – the whole frantic character of Cal, for one – glides by on some confident style and echoes of beloved family movies – Steve Carell’s superior voice work in Despicable Me, the post-war magic of Roald Dahl stories (sans anything sharp or evil), the pitch-perfect childhood nostalgia of the Toy Story franchise. Though set in present-day Brooklyn Heights, the film has a decidedly retro feel, harkening back to a time when New Yorkers decorated their apartments with antique record players and ornate lamp shades, when kids were largely unsupervised and childhood memories were more tactile. (At 12 years old, Bea was presumably born in the 2010s, yet there’s nary an iPhone in sight; fair enough, as watching old footage on Y2K camcorders evokes much more nostalgia than scrolling through the camera roll.)
There’s a vague out-of-time feeling to If, nagging if you think about it but generally swept along with the tide of gesturing toward, if not always celebrating, imagination. A dance and CGI-laden sequence in which Bea redecorates the Memory Lane retirement home through sheer power of creativity invigorates a somewhat plodding first half, and also reminds how everything before it felt curiously staid by comparison. If is at its best when the cacophony of loyal Imaginary Friends – a unicorn, a green blob, a pink alligator, a talking ice cup, an invisible guy named Keith, to name a few – dial up the spectacle.
For a film that very much bills itself as a comedy, particularly through the lovable and literally bumbling character of Blue, If is fairly short on actual laughs. Instead, it settles by the end into misty-eyed, mostly earned sweetness, with the evergreen lesson of remembering love and playfulness as you grow up. Bells and whistles and imaginary friends aside, it’s that message of the inner child that’s ultimately essential – and If channels just enough of it for this viewer to, at least for a few moments, remember hers.
If is in US and UK cinemas on 17 May.
