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LINOLEUM

Producers: Chad Simpson, Dennis Masel and Chadd Harbold  Director: Colin West    Screenplay: Colin West   Cast: Jim Gaffigan, Rhea Seehorn, Katelyn Nacon, Gabriel Rush, Amy Hargreaves, West Duchovny, Elisabeth Henry, Roger Hendricks Simon, Michael Ian Black, Jay Walker, Willoughby Pyle and Tony Shalhoub   Distributor: Shout! Studios

Grade: B

Colin West’s second feature is partially about a mid-life crisis, partially a coming-of-age tale, and partially a tale of an elderly man sinking into dementia—and it builds up oddity after oddity in making its way to a revelation that draws them all together like the pieces of a puzzle finally solved.  Whether the picture that “Linoleum” ultimately discloses will be enlightening or frustrating will depend on whether viewers thinks that their patience has been rewarded or betrayed. 

The film stars actor and stand-up comic Jim Gaffigan in a dual role.  He’s firstly Cameron Edwin, a rumpled fifty-something guy depressed by the collapse of his career and his marriage.  Trained as an astronomer, he’s losing the hosting gig on the kids’ science show he created for a Dayton PBS outlet with his wife Erin (Rhea Seehorn), who’s now planning to divorce him and take a prestigious museum job in another city.  The show was in decline, relegated to a midnight time slot, but what’s especially galling to Cameron is that now that it’s being considered for national expansion, he’ll be replaced by Kent Armstrong, a blustery, arrogant ex-astronaut (Cameron’s own dream had always been to be part of NASA’s space program).  It’s also disturbing that Armstrong looks unnervingly like a younger, hardier version of him (Gaffigan also plays Kent).

Cameron has other problems.  His father Mac (Roger Hendricks Simon), a former NASA engineer, is in a nursing home, and the doctor there (Tony Shalhoub) informs Cameron that Mac’s dementia is worsening.  At home Cameron’s daughter gay Nora (Katelyn Nacon) is finding it difficult to fit in at school, and his young son Sam (Willoughby Pyle) spends most of his time silently playing with his phone.

Additionally, very weird things have started happening to Cameron.  After bicycling home from the TV studio one day, a red Corvette crashed out of the sky near him with Kent its driver, yet the next day he’s introduced to the apparently unharmed Kent by his boss (Michael Ian Black).  Kent also moves into the house across the street from the Edwin homestead along with his son Marc (Geoffrey Rush), who becomes Nora’s best friend (among other things, they share a Halloween birthday) and also takes to Cameron, who, he confides to the girl, seems like a nicer version of his own domineering father.

But there’s more.  A strange elderly woman (Elisabeth Henry) begins appearing to Cameron in the street.  And the car isn’t the only thing to fall out of the sky: a remnant of a spacecraft crashes into the Edwin back yard, which Cameron will ultimately identify as part of the Apollo program.  At the suggestion of Marc, and with help from Mac, whom he brings back to their house, Cameron undertakes to rebuild the wreckage, perhaps to realize his dream of becoming an astronaut himself.  Meanwhile Marc gets into trouble at school and Kent forbids him to see Nora anymore, thinking her the cause of the boy’s behavior—even as the two teens are planning a joint Halloween/birthday party. 

The increasingly strangely intertwined events West fashions, and the odd, hallucinatory way he presents them, make “Linoleum” feel evermore quirky, a mash-up of styles and themes that can feel infuriatingly opaque.  Yet he manages to meld them all together in the final act, even though on reflection one may conclude that the wrap-up leaves some threads dangling.  But Gaffigan grounds the often baffling goings-on with a sympathetic ordinary-guy turn as Cameron (his Kent is something else entirely), and the rest of the cast are solid, with Nacon and Rush in particular hitting all the right notes as youngsters struggling to find their places in their domestic worlds.  Production designer Mollie Wartelle and costumer July Rose White add a vaguely nineties quality to the mix, the live-action-and-animation clips from Cameron’s show are used cleverly as transitional devices commenting wryly on the action, and cinematographer Ed Wu, editor Keara Burton and composer Mark Hadley all contribute to the deliberately off-kilter vibe.

You might see “Linoleum” as a smaller but equally surrealistic slice of life as Noah Baumbach’s “White Noise,” with which it shares a small-town Ohio locale, and like that film it will probably elicit strongly divergent reactions.  But while in the end it’s really nothing more than a cinematic parlor trick, for the most part it’s an intriguing one, even if a completely satisfactory resolution to its myriad mysteries proves elusive. 

Now Showing

JESUS REVOLUTION

Producers: Kevin Downes, Jon Erwin, Andrew Erwin, Daryl Lefever, Joshua Walsh and Jerilyn Equibel   Directors: Jon Erwin and Brent McCorkle   Screenplay: John Gunn and Jon Erwin   Cast: Joel Courtney, Jonathan Roumie, Kimberly Williams-Paisley, Anna Grace Barlow, Kelsey Grammer, Nic Bishop, Jackson Robert Scott, Nicholas Cirillo, Ally Ioannides, Julia Campbell, Mina Sundwall, DeVon Franklin, Charlie Morgan Patton and Jolie Jenkins   Distributor: Lionsgate

Grade: C

Here’s a faith-based film whose basic appeal is to the charismatic evangelical group whose origin it celebrates—the Calvary Chapel Association, which numbers nearly two thousand independent churches globally.  Based on a 2018 book by Greg Laurie, who joined the denomination early on and became pastor at one of Calvary Chapel’s first expansion churches, it’s what can be called an authorized cinematic history, with rough edges smoothed off and a benign face put on everything.  But it does paint a portrait, however sanitized, of an intriguing movement of twentieth-century Christian revivalism in the United States. 

The movie’s title comes from a gushing 1971 cover story in Time Magazine, but the start of the so-called Jesus movement dates from a few years earlier, when Lonnie Frisbee, who’d joined the hippies of San Francisco in his late teens, began talking about the Bible among the flower children.  Preaching the gospel became a preoccupation, and he soon had attracted a following.  In 1968 he was introduced to Chuck Smith, the pastor of a small traditional church at Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, who invited him and his followers to become part of the still-fledgling congregation, which grew astronomically under Smith and Frisbee and gained notoriety in the process.  Greg Laurie, a teen searching for direction in his life, joined the group in 1970 under Frisbee’s supportive guidance.

The treatment by John Gunn and co-director Jon Erwin passes over Frisbee’s early career, starting in 1968 with Smith, portrayed by Kelsey Grammer as a preacher initially hostile to the hippie lifestyle but easily convinced by the easygoing sincerity of Frisbee (Jonathan Roumie) to invite hippies into his church despite the opposition of some of its less open-minded members.  Separately we’re introduced to Laurie (Joel Courtney), a kid from a broken home whose mother Charlene (Kimberly Williams-Paisley) is an alcoholic, being introduced to the movement by pretty Cathe (Anna Grace Barlow), and gradually becoming fully committed to it.  Nodding to its source, the movie also includes some flashbacks to his unhappy childhood, in which he’s played by Jackson Robert Scott.

From this point the movie becomes a simple success story, with the movement growing astronomically and becoming a national media phenomenon through the appearance of the Time story (the author of which is played by Devon Franklin) and spawning an explosion of upbeat Christian music.  Laurie, adept with a camera, documents the rise, eventually assuming a role among the denomination’s unofficial leadership team.

The one discordant element is the departure of Frisbee, presented here as the result of his increasingly grandiose view of himself as a faith-healer and prophet.  In reality his lifestyle was complicated, and his separation from the denomination not nearly as simple a matter as depicted here; interested viewers might want to check out David Di Sabatino’s 2007 documentary “Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher,” which also goes into his life after the breakup.  “Jesus Revolution” ignores his post-1971 troubles, content merely to note in a closing caption that he and Smith reconciled prior to Frisbee’s death in 1993.

Unfortunately for the movie, Roumie’s absence from the last third or so leaves a gaping dramatic hole that Grammer and Courtney don’t fill manage to fill; he’s quietly charismatic, and not just in a religious sense, while they’re just dully earnest.  So ultimately we’re left with a vision of what seems a bland, feel- good version of Christianity, with doctrinal nuances pretty much overlooked in favor of a simple message that accepting Jesus as savior through baptism will bring joy and peace.  (In reality the denomination officially espouses a Calvinist theology, though hardly of an extreme sort.)  On a more positive note, production designer Aimee Holmberg and costumer Anna Redmon are fairly successful in creating a 1960s ambience, and cinematographer Akis Konstantakopoulos does a pretty good job of convincing us that the Alabama locations are actually in Southern California.  John Puckett’s editing can feel somewhat lethargic, but the score by co-director Brent McCorkle captures the era decently, especially as augmented by snatches of pop tunes.

Congregants of churches in the Calvary Chapel Association will no doubt appreciate seeing their founding fathers portrayed so positively on screen.  Those who are not members of the choir may enjoy being introduced to what is now a distant religious movement, even if the approach is relentlessly upbeat, inspirational and simplistic.