Delayed Reaction: Unicorn Store

The Pitch: Brie Larson has an Oscar and wants to direct.

A failed artist moves back in with her parents. While trying to adapt to the regular world, she keeps getting distracted by this strange man with a store who keeps promising her a unicorn.

There's this hilarious story that's been going around about Unicorn Store. So, some guy on Twitter tweeted something about how Brie Larson hadn't paid her dues enough to be directing a film already, also mentioning that she only got the chance because of "the Captain Marvel wave". Netflix decided to reply to that tweet with a big list of all her credentials which Brie Larson retweeted, simply adding "NETFLEX". It was a nice bit of social media brand-defense on Netflix's part, but otherwise, pretty forgettable.

I find this exchange interesting for a lot of reasons. That tweet was selected by Netflix for how perfectly misguided it was. Here his entire tweet:

Lol this looks like bleh. Take notes from Jonah Hill, who was mentored by Martin Scorsese, and took years before he made his directorial debut out of respect for the artistry of film and the position of director. This seems like she’s just riding Captain Marvel’s wave.

 First of all, the opening sentence is perfectly structure Twitter speak. That lets us know this guy isn't any kind of authority. He then brings up Jonah Hill as someone who did it the "right" way. I love Jonah Hill. He's in several of my favorite movies, but he shouldn't be anyone's template. His first film role was a part in I Heart Huckabees that he got because he was friends with Dustin Hoffman's kids. He's been able to leverage his different friendships into a lot of great opportunities throughout his career. He got two surprising Oscar nominations*. When he finally decided to direct, he made an indie movie using major studio connections and resources and asserted that the story about lower class-skater punks was inspired by memories of his childhood, even though he lived a comfortable upper-middle class life. Again, I love Jonah Hill and think he's delivered with every opportunity he's been given, but he is the worst person to point to when looking for an example of someone who "did it the hard way". I'm also not denying that Brie Larson has had a fairly easy path too. She's been a successful actress since she was a child. Larson and Hill's stories are far more similar than different.

*Neither nomination was locked up going into Oscar nomination morning. Based on the other precursor nominations, he was lucky to get both of them.

Finally, the tweet says that Unicorn Store is "riding the Captain Marvel wave". I mean, sure, it obviously got picked up by Netflix and released at a time when Brie Larson's visibility was at its peak. That is every studio's strategy with every release. In other news, they are releasing the next Star Wars movie when they think it will make the most money. Duh. More importantly, Unicorn Store premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2017. It was completed well before that. Brie Larson had been cast as Captain Marvel by then, but that's about it. If she was riding any wave, it would be the one from winning a fucking Oscar. I suspect that when she was selected to direct Unicorn Store, the producers were thinking more about that Oscar than the Captain Marvel casting news.

Look, I don't mean to pile on this guy. I think it's a little shitty that Netflix targeted him for that tweet. He's not a reviewer or even a verified account. He's just a guy who made a comment that was uninformed, but pretty harmless. Now he has an army of Netflix and Brie Larson fans calling him sexist among other things. I haven't researched his other tweets, but based on that one alone, he reads as more of a fool than anything more nefarious.

When I finally got to watching the movie, I realized that Unicorn Store is the exact movie I expected it would be, given all the parts. It's competently made. Brie Larson doesn't have any masterful directorial flourishes. She also doesn't make a mess of it. She does well enough to prove that she knows what she's doing. If she directs another movie in the future, I feel confident that it will be good too. Maybe a little better. There aren't any great performances in the movie. In the lead role, Larson is a little too quirky for my taste. I like sarcastic, quippy Brie Larson. I like grounded, dramatic Brie Larson. I'm not there yet for twee Brie Larson (yet). Everyone else plays their roles about 10% exaggerated, which fits the world of the film. No one showed me anything I hadn't seen from them before, but they also played to their strengths. I'd happily see Joan Cusack and Bradley Whitford play an overenthusiastic couple in anything. I like how much people smile in this. Martha MacIsaac has a great smile. I don't get why she doesn't show up more often in movies like this. Samuel L. Jackson is having a blast, as expected.

The lack of subtlety worked against the touches of surrealism. Either have a metaphor for the audience to figure out or drop the metaphor and have characters explain how they feel. Having both is redundant. Since the movie spells its message out, all the quirkier elements feel like overkill. Perhaps if a little more of the humor landed, that would've balanced things out a lot better.

I'm happy to watch that cast in a movie together. As director, Larson mostly stays out of the way to let the performers work. The deciding factor for me is that it lacks any one things that exceeded my expectations. No one thing - an inspired supporting performance, clever dialogue, an interesting design element - sticks out when I think about it, which is a shame. I wanted to like this a lot.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend