PALM SPRINGS: You May Kiss the Now

Director: Max Barbakow
Writer: Andy Siara
Cast: Andy Samberg, Cristin Milioti, J.K. Simmons
Runtime: 90 mins.
2020

How do you show the passage of time onscreen? How do you shape an era, or an eon? How do you characterize the empty periods, the boring moments? How do you establish an existential weight? Films only have an hour and a half* to tell their story. They don't carry the same longevity or interiority as a novel.

*or three and a half if you're producing a contemporary blockbuster

Palm Springs makes the void of time its entire project, and it communicates that void almost entirely through implication. Nyles (Andy Samberg) has been stuck in a classic Groundhog Day-style time loop at a wedding in Palm Springs. Though he is our protagonist, our perspective character is Sarah (Cristin Milioti), sister of the bride. Nyles tries to seduce her and accidentally gets her stuck in the same time loop. There is no choice but to introduce her to the life of nihilism and dull despair that he has been living for cycles beyond count.

Palm Springs is an Andy Samberg comedy, but it's not about the goofy time loop jokes (though there are plenty good ones, like Nyles's infinitely bored sexual explorations). Instead it is a character study first and foremost, a rather subtle one that ought to cement Samberg on the long list of comedic actors with immense dramatic talent. Samberg doesn't play the buffoon here. Maybe Nyles was once a buffoon, but any antic energy has long since withered into acid irony. The luster has left Nyles's life long ago; the bare minimum is all he can muster. Even when he's navigating a perfect sequence of moves across the dance floor, or grabbing the attention of the room with a surprising speech, his eyes are hollow. There's a sense that anything he can do is always already played out.

Sarcasm is only the first of Nyles's cumulative defense mechanisms that unravel over the course of the film. When Sarah asks him about his past, we can't quite tell if he can't remember or if he's lying. These moments of ambiguity point to the numbness of personal history unmoored from linear time. Maybe Nyles himself isn't sure what he remembers anymore.

Nyles's dissociation is counterbalanced by Milioti's performance as Sarah. Where Samberg is all pouty debauchery, Milioti is all rawness and sharp edges. Nyles has long ago drowned, but Sarah is still thrashing for air. Milioti delivers a screen-dominating performance that I hope she gets a lot of exposure for; her work here is bombastic, yet always anchored in deep emotional reality and filled with the tiny quirks and details that make great performances great.

Palm Springs thrives as an intimate exploration of its central duo, with a delightful J.K. Simmons thrown in as the wild card sociopath Roy. The movie isn't flashy, but it is precise. It relies entirely on its performances and on the strength of its dialogue, well-paced and deeply-felt. The most surprising scenes are the quietest, when revelations of cosmic importance take the form of laughs shared, communications botched, and the little lost words that we think for a second might unlock the truth of our experience. The ones that inevitably get tangled on the lips, and dissipate into the cool night.

4 / 5  BLOBS