The Californians (2005)

I liked the concept of this movie but it was too cluttered. My mother agrees with me on this point. There are so many themes running that it feels like having a three course meal from McDonald's drive-in. There are also too many main characters. This movie is about messages - naturalist to commercialized, being true to others and/or oneself. This movie feels like the writing was inspired by passion. The problem is that all that passion means nothing if it gets caught in a blender. In this case less is truly more. Finally, I must say in defines of this movie... life sometimes jumps in and out, up and down very quickly. The people in our lives are many and sometimes we are forced to make rapid decisions regareding them and us.

It is difficult to believe that this discerning cast would have involved themselves in this project if the initial reading proved to be as unsatisfying as the finished work.Another work, John D. McDonalds' book "Condominium", for example, dealt with similar subject matter but with an intelligence and style that allowed the protagonists to be understandable and even sympathetic characters in spite of their flaws. In "The Californians" the characters appeared unaware of the importance of the world around them while wandering aimlessly through their own, increasingly trivial, lives.To paraphrase Rudyard Kipling: "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirsand blaming it on you ... chances are you haven't grasped thesituation! "

One has to wonder how did Henry James novel "The Bostonians" inspired Jonathan Parker into re-telling it using themes of ecology, greed and love in the Californian landscape of Marin County. The basic problem with the film is that it throws a lot of ideas around, but eventually none of them come to be realized.The idea that a young woman, Zoe, the daughter of progressive parents that are into the environment and that falls for the greedy developer, Gavin,is something that doesn't pan well. The same goes for Olive, the sister of Gavin who is opposed to all his big plans to create a gated community where multi-million dollar homes are going to built.The only interesting thing in the film is the cast that Mr. Parker attracted. Noah Wyle, Ileana Douglas, Kate Mora, Joanne Whalley, Keith Carradine, Cloris Leachman, and Valerie Perrine, are among the players of this satirical film that doesn't live to its premise.

I live in Marin County where this flick was filmed and was an extra in it. I remember watching Jonathan Parker direct his actors and thinking, "This is gonna look better in the finished product. It HAS to." Because what I was seeing looked laughably amateurish. If not for the presence of name actors like Noah Wylie and Illiana Douglas, I would have assumed I was watching the production of a student film.Well, when this baby finally hit screens at the Mill Valley Film Festival, I was surprised to find my suspicions had been correct: no amount of editing or re-packaging was gonna polish this turd.What's too bad about all this is that, at its core, the movie had some good ideas. The ongoing battle between slick, greedy developers and aging, environmentalist hippie boomers is a very real one here in the Bay Area, and there's ample hypocrisy and fodder for satire on both sides.But Parker gets lost in a sea of tired clichés and labored, talky dialog and in the end can't decide what kind of movie he wants to make. Is it a satire of the tug-of-war between progress and preservation and the colorful players involved? Or is it a sappy, love-triangle romance? Or how about the tale of a short-sighted man's redemption by way of a flighty young songbird? The Californians tries to be all these things (and more) and ends up being nothing more than a muddled, uneven mess.