If any movie from this past January’s Sundance Film Festival could have become a major hit, pre-pandemic, of course, it would have been “Palm Springs,” a “Groundhog Day”-esque comedy starring Andy Samberg. Notice, my usage of the past tense to describe this film’s potential theatrical success, mostly because, “Palm Springs,” due to the ongoing pandemic, has now been relegated to a straight-to-HULU streaming release. NEON and Hulu teamed up to buy the film for a whopping $15 million at Sundance, with the original deal including a theatrical release. The film is now set to debut on HULU this Friday. Don’t miss this compulsively entertaining movie.
Despite retreading the familiar time-loop trope, this is an incredibly entertaining movie — probably the funniest movie you will see this year. A summer release is perfect for “Palm Springs”, which follows a man and woman forced to continuously relive a day in their life at a friend’s wedding. It’s better than it sounds. Samberg, along with director Max Barbakow, finds new and original ways to make us laugh with this usually tiresome narrative gimmick. However, don’t mistake this movie for another silly Lonely Island production. It’s actually sweetly touching, thanks to Samberg and Milloti’s surprisingly humane chemistry.
One doesn’t think of Samberg as the typical leading man in a rom-com, but he’s found the perfect partner here. Milioti — who played Leonardo DiCaprio’s first wife in “The Wolf of Wall Street”— is fearlessly hilarious, but doesn’t forget to bring out the emotional potency that can seep through Andy Siara’s inventive screenplay. Siara turns the time-loop genre over its head, refusing to adhere, in the conventional sense of the term, to any of the tropes that usually come with it. Last year, Netflix’s “Russian Doll” managed to bring a meta-awareness to the circular narrative, and, much like that brilliant show, what Barbakow and Siara do here is tackle heavy themes with inventively-delivered comedy.
It’s no fair revealing the film’s surprises, which start in the first few minutes, but just know that long-term relationships are dissected in “Palm Springs” with a keen eye for detail, ditto Siara’s obsession with the meaningless of life, which is seen as this madly anarchic and dementedly inescapable thing. It’s this sense of isolation and existentialism that makes “Palm Springs” more than just a very silly “Lonely Island” production. Not bad for a mainstream comedy starring well-known goofball Andy Samberg. [B+]
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