Lonely Island’s buzzy Palm Springs, which came out in mid-July, weirdly resonated with folks who’ve been stuck in their own quarantine time loops for the better part of this year. The positive reviews reminded me of the way that Blast from the Past (the second movie from 1999 I have referenced in two days!) fed my soul early on in April, when Wife would only watch movies starring Brendan Fraser and we had no patience for Monkey Bone. We should stop and reflect on how excellently this gem of a movie is crafted. It has easily become one of my favorite movies of all time, its charm and purity, it’s uncanny echoes of the present moment, its self-awareness, Alicia Silverstone. Dave Foley. Did you forget that Christopher Walken is in this movie? You forgot, but that’s okay, it’s been a while, or it’s been never. Maybe you’ve never seen this movie and I’m currently praising a film you have yet to see but will turn on later tonight after you’ve put the kids to bed and microwaved some popcorn you kept stashed behind the cupboard for a special occasion. Whatever the case, reviewers have been reaching for that movie that especially captures the essence of this moment, intentionally or otherwise (at some point insert a link here to SXSW’s short film entry Face To Face, which was eerily ahead of its time on calling out the awkwardness of dating-by-vid), and Palm Springs fell into that furrow of thinking for a little bit.
Spoilers ahead. Often cited as a spiritual successor to Harvard professor and former professional baseball player Danny Rubin’s 2004 È già ieri, an Italian remake of little known American cult film Groundhog Day (1993) by the same director, Palm Springs advances the plot tropes established in that story: Sarah (played by Cristin Milioti) meets Andy Sandberg’s Nyles after he has already spent years stuck in a time loop and grown comfortable with the repetition. The first act is capped off nicely by a violent coitus interruptus as the mysterious Roy (JK Simmons) impales Nyles with an arrow after a slow, romantic build-up between Nyles and Sarah. The second act puts a new spin on the time loop by giving us the day’s events as repeated for Sarah. The audience isn’t aware of what’s an echo and what’s not, so there’s some interpretational work for us to do, which makes the ways in which the wedding day departs from her original experience of the day even more funny and enjoyable to watch. We’re not stuck in the same visual loop as the characters. The joys of learning the script of learning a morning routine by heart are implied in the smoothness with which first Nyles and then both Sarah and Nyles navigate their worlds.
The fact that these two experience the loop together is not necessarily new. There’s a similar premise in Netflix’s Russian Doll, though that reveal comes a lot further down the pike. Here, the relationship between the initiated, jaded Nyles and imaginative and panicked Sarah allows for the two to tick through the rules of our fantasy universe, provides some humor through metacritique of the fantasy mechanics, and gives us a chance to explore character building through infinite variations of interactions between our static background characters and our changing protagonists. In that way, Palm Springs draws more echoes with two recent episodes from Season 4 of Rick and Morty than anything else.
The third act proposes a moral solution to the loop (á la Russian Doll), but it’s ultimately shelved in favor of a scientific deus ex(plosion) machina. This is a nice twist, because it shifts the tone of the film from something potentially preachy into something a little more metaphorical: the clash of two personalities with varying levels of comfort with their lives’ lack of momentum. Each of the characters deals with the cloying feeling of quarantine in different ways: Sarah wants to think her way out, Nyles has taken advantage of repetition by imposing a measure of stability over his life, but Roy finds a measure of joy in the preservation of evanescent moments. Allison Willmore at Vulture suggests that Roy, not Nyles, is the heart of this movie because of his emotional arc over the course of the loops.
I keep stumbling on this movie with friends in conversation this month and everyone I talk to is so relieved to have found this movie in the middle of a static summer. I’m not going to make a joke out of saying to watch it again and again and again and again, but it’s probably worth a looksee once.
