Maybe it’s because of his years starring in the sitcom The Office that John Krasinski couldn’t recognize the discordant mishmash of tones that prevents his feature directorial debut from working.
That NBC show usually managed to mix both cartoonish characters and genuine moments of emotion well enough. The Hollars attempts the same trick but with only about 90 minutes of screen time, unlike a TV series that gets the chance to be build up hours upon hours of goodwill with its audience before expecting them to care deeply about the characters.
Krasinski plays a man not terribly different from his Office role, a voice of reason in a world seemingly overrun by morons and nutcases. John Hollar (Krasinski) returns to his hometown after his mother Sally (Margo Martindale) collapses due to a brain tumor. He’s ambivalent about the impending birth of his first child with his girlfriend Rebecca (Anna Kendrick) because he’s afraid it will lock him into a path in life that he’s not certain he wants.
Meanwhile John’s father Don (Richard Jenkins) is a mess both because of his wife’s ill health and because his business is about to go bankrupt. His brother Ron (Sharlto Copley) has lost his job, gotten divorced, and rarely gets to see his two daughters. Things aren’t going well for the Hollar family. But I couldn’t take any of their plights as seriously as the aggressively soulful soundtrack implores.
When Don is played for laughs, portrayed as a bumbling idiot who thought Sally’s temporary paralysis and blindness just meant she needed to lose some weight, how am I supposed to respond to seeing him share emotional bits of homespun wisdom with John? After Ron peppers his mother’s doctor with absurdly stupid questions (also played for laughs) and comes off as an unhinged human being who should be denied child visitation rights, why do I care whether he’ll make peace with his ex?
The Hollars wants to play it both ways and ends up with nothing but a few chuckles and a few too many groans at its bald-faced sentimentality.
