‘Jimpa’ Review: Olivia Colman and John Lithgow in a Well-Intentioned but Numbingly Earnest Inter-Generational Queer Family Drama
After Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, a virtuoso showcase for Emma Thompson that was also a rare candid conversation about an older woman’s sexuality, Australian filmmaker Sophie Hyde returns in Jimpa to territory closer to 52 Tuesdays. That 2014 debut feature, a prize-winner for direction at Sundance, felt highly personal. This new film takes that quality several steps further, drawing inspiration from the death of Hyde’s father and casting her nonbinary teenager as a 16-year-old presumably not unlike themself. Made with love and acted with great empathy by a cast led by always dependable pros Olivia Colman and John Lithgow, Jimpa is nothing if not sincere.
But to be brutally honest, it’s also kind of a cringey bore, like being stuck in a room with a bunch of oversharers from queer studies class. Even the novel sight of Lithgow cavorting in an Amsterdam sex dungeon, naked aside from a leather vest and nipple ring, can’t inject much life into it.
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Hyde and co-writer Matthew Cormack deserve credit for depicting queer culture not as a single homogeneous monolith but as a diverse spectrum of factions that can intersect or collide. It’s also refreshing that the arc of the well-adjusted teenage character, Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde), is not about trauma or gender identity. That said, the movie has more representational value than narrative vitality.
One of Hyde’s chief interests here appears to be the marked differences across three generations of LGBTQ+ people, even within the same family — particularly in the nuances of how we self-identify and the obsolescence of categorizing fellow travelers strictly along binary lines, whether it’s gender or sexuality.
There’s no doubt a worthwhile film to be made about the ideological disconnect between the generation that fought the tough fights for gay rights, AIDS awareness and sexual freedom and those that came along much later into a world that’s generally more open and accepting, albeit still with challenges. Sadly, this is not that film.
Colman (doing a subtle but more than passable Australian accent) plays Hannah, an Adelaide filmmaker pitching a project about the nonconfrontational dissolution of her parents’ marriage after her father, Jim (Lithgow), came out as gay. They chose kindness over conflict, she insists, which prompts funding executives and potential cast alike more or less to ask, “Where’s the movie?” Without conflict, they seem to suggest, there isn’t one.
But Hannah has archived the conflict away as her means of rationalizing why her father had to leave them behind when she was 13 to go off and experience a bigger life than Adelaide could provide. The full truth about her parents’ split comes out gradually, with minimal impact when it’s revealed. It’s unclear whether Hannah’s mother, Catherine (Deborah Kennedy), is aware of the film project but it’s quite clear that Jim, long settled in Amsterdam where he has continued the struggle while gorging non-monogamously on its fruits, is not.
Hannah plans to tell her father about the film when she and her impossibly perfect husband Harry (Daniel Henshall) take Frances to visit Jimpa, as they fondly call him. (If my ears didn’t deceive me, Jimpa jovially refers to Frances as his “grandthing,” which seems even worse.) But the teenager causes their parents concern by announcing their intention to stay on with Jimpa and do a year of high school in Amsterdam.
Given that both Hannah and Harry are paragons of supportive parenting, neither of them wants to be the one to say “No.” They figure Frances will realize it’s a bad idea once they spend some vacation time with hedonistic Jimpa.
Frances has always hero-worshipped their grandfather for his decades of community activism and his free-spirited choice to go off and chase the life he wanted, eventually moving into academia. His light-filled house on a canal, with its constant whirl of friends, lovers and queer kids, feels like an LGBTQ+ utopia. It’s at Jimpa’s cocktail party for his visiting family — where the entertainment is a shirtless hunk in a leather chest harness singing Puccini — that Frances meets the more worldly 19-year-old Isa (Zo? Love Smith).
They start dating, and Frances has their first taste of sex on the sun-dappled grass of a gay cruising ground, while naked men amuse each other through the trees. It’s like a sex-positive Eden! Isa and her queer posse represent a thrilling new enlightened world to Frances, whose previous experience of sex had been limited to gender studies.
Which makes it especially disappointing when their idolized Jimpa and his trio of old pals — sass-dispensing, arched-eyebrow aunties who break into spontaneous verses of “Don’t Leave Me This Way” as required — reveal the narrowness of their views on the sexuality spectrum. Surely no one’s still saying “queer used to mean something different” in an LGBTQ+ movie, you might think. But you’d be wrong.
Not that the tension builds into anything interesting beyond Frances pouting by a canal for a minute. That’s also because Jimpa turns into a different movie when there’s a health crisis that brings Hannah’s prickly sister Emily (Kate Box) running. That emergency also shifts the focus back to Hannah, who must wrestle with her conflicted feelings toward Jim and decide whether to tell the truth in her film about her parents’ divorce or iron out the wrinkles in the story. Which again, doesn’t exactly make for compelling drama.
This is a movie plastered with good intentions. It shows us the all-important lifeline of love and support in the families (both biological and chosen) of LGBTQ+ people; the prejudices faced by gender nonconforming folks even within queer communities; and the difficulties of aging for a generation of gay men whose frontline battles during the AIDS pandemic made them not expect to be around for their senior years.
But Cormack and Hyde’s script too often feels like it was built from bullet points in an LGBTQ media reference guide. Despite sensitive work from the actors and an obvious grounding in the director’s own personal life, the family at the center of the drama are such models of saintly liberal acceptance that it’s hard to invest in them as people.
At times, they almost feel like characters in an SNL parody of the ultimate Sundance drama — Hannah, Harry and Frances are all vegans; Hannah conducts intimacy workshops with actors; 40-ish Harry is so cool and laid-back he still skateboards (Henshall deserves better); Hannah has thoughtful chats with Frances about compersion (Google it) and polyamory; mother and, I repeat, 16-year-old child take milky baths together. Don’t ask me what that’s about, but eww.
I’m old enough to remember a bleak time when queer people were starved for thoughtful, multi-dimensional screen representation, but it pains me to say that my eyeballs were rolling like slot machines for much of the very earnest Jimpa. Oh well, at least Amsterdam looks pretty.
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