A ‘Palm Springs’ Review
While there’s typically a thousand ways Palm Springs could fail, it succeeds in all of them, creating the best comedy of the year that will have an endearing legacy.
Sometime in the next few days, there will be plenty of articles and YouTube videos of dudes explaining the ending to Palm Springs or how the infinite time loop works or positing how long Andy Samberg’s Nyles was repeating his days before Cristin Milioti’s Sarah entered the loop. I’m here to tell you none of that matters. What matters is how Palm Springs makes you feel. What matters is that Palm Springs is one of the most enjoyable releases in recent memory. What matters is that the nature of a film about every day being the same fits perfectly into the consciousness where so many folks feel like every day is the same because they’re stuck at home.
Collaborators Max Barbakow and Andy Siara were two people who I had no prior relationship to coming into the film, and I think it is safe to say the majority of the people who will watch Palm Springs will have a similar lack of knowledge of them. I say this because after seeing the film, I’m all the way in on whatever feature these two decide to work on next. They are two people with vision and enough self awareness to know the sort of film their making and when to play their hand. In an effort to convince you to watch the film without revealing the plethora of little things that help Palm Springs, I’ll link the trailer here and let you know the long and short of the movie is built around the premise of two people becoming stuck in an infinite time loop at a wedding they’re both attending. That’s what you need to know, it’s a take on Groundhog Day that is far less dour and with much more attractive people (that’s not to take away from Groundhog Day, the movie is essentially perfect and I love it, I just speak the truth). It’s a high concept romcom, use the concept as a framing device to display real emotions, get lots of laughs, and show off excellent chemistry.
Speaking of chemistry, Palm Springs has chemistry in freaking spades. Watching Samberg and Milioti perform dance numbers, drink innumerable beers, and fall in love over the course of 90 minutes brings me great joy. It helps that both of them are incredibly funny performers playing in a space that is smartly written, Siara knows the right amount of cynicism and pith to include for a film like this. Springs never gets to the point of no return or twists your arm to feel a certain way, it’s a romcom, we want to feel good and look at beautiful people fall in love. In the same way that Groundhog Day uses the location of Punxsutawney, PA in early February as a backdrop for a miserable man in a less than ideal locale, Palm Springs utilizes sunny California as the perfect environment of a city that rarely rains and stays warm year round. Is Palm Springs perfect? No, there are one or two plot lines that are meant to give characters their motivations that end up feeling a bit unnecessary and seem as though you could just ascribe those motivations to them anyways. But that’s where I feel like my criticism ends. Barbakow and Siara knew what they wanted to make and made it. It doesn’t have the trappings of an Appatow style comedy that peaks at around 90 minutes and still has another 45 to an hour left, it doesn’t try to make a big statement about the meaning of life beyond the value of finding a person who brings you joy, and they just cast two incredible actors and let them be funny and charming as hell.
I’m extremely grateful Palm Springs came out on Hulu. Had it gone into the theater machine, I fear it would’ve gone the way of a thousand other studio comedies and despite it being better than the vast majority of them, I might have missed out on it. Films like this just don’t last in popular consciousness in theaters nowadays. In 1993, Sleepless in Seattle, Mrs. Doubtfire, Groundhog Day, and Dave were all in the top 15 highest grossing films; had any of those movies come out in 2019, they’d make somewhere in the realm of 30 million dollars and be forgotten by the public. Hulu released it at just the right time and allowed for it to be seen by millions in its opening weekend, more than likely seen multiple times by a number of folks in the coming weeks due to it being eminently rewatchable. I’m not sure if Palm Springs will end up in the romcom cannon, but I know that I’ll be returning to it quite a bit as time goes on and I hope you do the same.