'Kajillionaire' shows how boomers stole from millennials — and what they'll keep stealing Miranda July made a heist film that's less about larceny and more about how the Me Generation is determined to take from us everything they can carry.
By Sam Thielman, reporter and cultural critic Baby boomers came of age loving films about embracing individuality and escaping their parents' authoritarian moralism, many of them beautiful — "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "A Clockwork Orange," "Easy Rider." Now that boomers have remade the world in their own image, a younger generation is making movies about what that world looks like — it isn't pretty — and how to live in it and maybe survive it.
Miranda July's "Kajillionaire" is one of them — and a lot of other things.
A "kajillion" isn't a real number, so it makes sense that most of what the movie's middle-age con artists, Robert (Richard Jenkins) and Theresa (Debra Winger), along with their daughter, Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood), steal isn't real money. Between a swindled gift certificate here, a little mail fraud there and a lot of funny business with big-box store return departments, the trio manage to eke out a dishonest living and pay for what we'll charitably call a home in an industrial building in Los Angeles, where the rent is very inexpensive because of the flood of pink bubbles that descends from the ceiling regularly — sometimes more than once a day — and must be hauled away in buckets.
The joke-y hook is that Robert and Theresa believe they're the kind of rakish, amoral tricksters you might find in a movie about a casino heist or a bank robbery; Jenkins in particular does a beautiful job of playing a guy who is absolutely convinced he's a George Clooney hero. But we can see that they're merely selfish, amusingly deluded crooks whose greed becomes less charming the more we see of their daughter, a woman who has been utterly smashed by their indifference.
So it is a heist film — and an absolutely savage one — but less about receipt fraud and more about how, in their declining years, the Me Generation simply won't go away without taking everything they can carry with them.
At one point, Robert and Theresa take Old Dolio and Melanie, played by Gina Rodriguez, out to a fancy dinner and recall their years of doing things other than stealing from people. "Of course, then the culture changed," says Robert, by way of explaining how they fell so far. "Maybe it'll change back!" Theresa says hopefully. Of course, it won't change back; culture is a product of the people in it. And Theresa and Robert won't change.
But "Kajillionaire" is also an essential L.A. movie, its sunny despair unmistakable, and it's about a sweet and tentative romance between Old Dolio and Melanie, who is as glamorous as Wood is deliberately frumpy.
Wood, incidentally, is a revelation here. Hidden inside her baggy trackwear and her father's shirts, she exudes a sense that, at any moment, she might burst into song or tears or just fly at her parents in a rage. (When July gives Wood a few precious moments to play that release, it's breathtaking to see.)
Rodriguez, on the other hand, has a hard job here, and an interesting one. She's our barometer for what normal ought to be, whereas Jenkins and Winger, the avaricious old hippies, are there to remind us of what normal is, which is a depressing sight, to say the least. (I'd like to say this is unfair, but you'd have to catch me in an especially good mood and several hours out from any news consumption to hear it from me.)
There are already quite a few treacly movies and books about the millennial tendency to create family out of trustworthy friends and romantic partners. "Kajillionaire" spends more time than most of them demonstrating why it is necessary for so many people to do this, and it wraps into it the profound need to escape boomer materialism — even if we do so with nothing but the clothes on our backs
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Sam Thielman is a reporter and critic based in New York. He is the creator, with film critic Alissa Wilkinson, of Young Adult Movie Ministry, a podcast about Christianity and movies, and his writing has been featured in The Columbia Journalism Review, The Guardian, Talking Points Memo and Variety. In 2017 he was political consultant for Comedy Central's "The President Show."
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Holy crap.
In one sense they do and did. Baby Boomers are going to vote themselves social benefits until there is nothing left to spend. Then, they will exit the world and leave the next generations the bills.
That’s a heck of a reputation to be leaving behind.
A Clockwork Orange is a beautiful movie?
I read the review twice and came away with it sounding like some sort of b movie small time crooks romance.
I have no idea where “boomer materialism” (whatever the heck that is) comes into play, I just know I have never stolen a dime from millenials although their outsized participation in welfare programs suggests the opposite is true.
The greatest generation (TGG) stole from the boomers. They did not fund their SS or Medicare benefits which grew rapidly during TGG’s retirement. Look up Claude Peppers. The boomers are set to do the same to the millennials but not to the same degree TGG did to the boomers because the boomers paid at a lot higher tax rate. At some point, however, the bill will become do.
This was started by the "greatest generation" stealing from the boomers.
The millenials are stealing just as much, without a generation to steal from them.
Yet.
For your interest.
But “Kajillionaire” is also an essential L.A. movie,
delusional insanity disguised as fashionable
The boomers stole everything from everyone. The WORLD is broke because of the boomers. There are trillions upon trillions in unfunded liabilities and outright debt. They brought in the third world to our nations and put them on welfare in exchange for our standards of living. They have brought us a progressive socialist government that is destroying prosperity and creating generations of snowflakes.
It is a huge fraud perpetrated by Hillary's generation against the millenials.
I’m first year Gen X. My kids are millennials. My oldest has 2 kids in Catholic schools. He works his ass off to provide for his family. My youngest is a trad-wife who is homeschooling her 2 kids. She works her ass off providing a loving home for her husband and children. My middle child died 4 years ago leaving behind a son of his own. He was building up a home remodeling business. Not all millennials are a lost cause just as boomers aren’t all former acid freak, DeadHeads. By the way, I can think of many words to describe A Clockwork Orange and beautiful ain’t one of them.
So let me see if I got this straight
The original commies from early 1900’s,,
fooled enough covetous morons to vote them into office on the promise of giving them their fellow citizens money while calling it The New Deal.
Then us conservatives started our decades long complaint of the commies stealing our
descendants wealth and future by pushing the debt onto folks not yet born who had no vote in the matter
Then these commies and socialists (democrats)
kept spending money they didn’t have for decades, and taught their lil commie offspring to keep voting fellow commies, socialists and democrats into office to keep the generational theft going for decades,,,
And now their little commie descendents want to blame us conservatives for it ?
And do a generational genocide ?
Yup,,,sounds like something commie moron pyschopaths would say and do.
Debra Winger hasn’t aged well.
They should be more angry about how we taught them to hate civilization. Middle-class welfare and women abandoning their children; I don’t blame them for being pissed off.
Every generation of taxpayers pays the cost of supporting the seniors that came before them.
There is nothing special about this generation, except for their inflated sense of self-importance and entitlement.
-PJ
Gen X says can you both please just shut up? We’re trying to make a living!
This is just another front opened up by the deep state in order to keep us divided. If we are divided we can’t unite against them.... The proof that this works is contained in this thread...
So we may be leaving the millennials $80 trillion in debt, but we are also leaving the millennials $80 trillion in receivables.
The bigger question is what kind of world are we leaving the millennials.
But I guess you're not asking the big question. You're asking the more immediate question about the debt and what it means.
I believe it can be resolved within a capitalist market economy.
Bottom line:
The novel A Clockwork Orange was written by Anthony Burgess, a World War II veteran (born 1917)...not a boomer. I read the novel when I was in high school. I have never had any desire to see the movie and don't know how faithful it is to the novel.
When I die, I won’t owe my two sons a penny. They get more than enough from me each month, and then some, to pay them back whatever I might have Inadvertently stole from them the past 50 years. And they can split my life insurance between them.