Wish I Was Here

Zach Braff fans will be pleased to hear that he hasn’t changed his tune much since mak­ing his direc­to­r­i­al debut with 2004’s Gar­den State. In that navel-gaz­ing cult odd­i­ty, Braff played a strug­gling actor whose mother’s death becomes the cat­a­lyst for a jour­ney of soul-search­ing and self-dis­cov­ery. In Wish I Was Here, Braff plays a strug­gling actor forced to reassess his life when his father is tak­en ter­mi­nal­ly ill. Lath­er, rinse, repeat.

The major dif­fer­ence now is that, a decade on, Braff is more suit­ed to play­ing an adult approach­ing cri­sis. For starters he appears more com­fort­able in his own skin, which is just begin­ning to show signs of indus­try fatigue. And, although he’s scarce­ly endowed with lead­ing man charis­ma, at 39 he’s a more assured cen­tral pres­ence than before.

He’s also adjust­ed his ​‘dead­beat son’ rou­tine to com­prise ​‘dead­beat dad’ – his win­ning chem­istry with onscreen kids Joey King and Pierce Gagnon holds the film togeth­er when­ev­er the script gets too earnest. Less nat­ur­al is the rela­tion­ship between Braff’s Aidan and Kate Hud­son as bread-win­ning wife, Sarah, though a ten­der deathbed heart-to-heart reme­dies much of her mater­nal passivity.

Aside from a hand­ful of clunky fan­ta­sy sequences depict­ing Braff as a sword-wield­ing space ranger per­pet­u­al­ly run­ning from a mys­te­ri­ous cloaked fig­ure (metaphor!), there’s not enough here to sug­gest that Braff has devel­oped as a film­mak­er. Sure, all of the basic ingre­di­ents that made Gar­den State click for some peo­ple are present, and Braff tack­les the same Big Themes with the same degree of heart-on-sleeve sin­cer­i­ty, but any­one (i.e. the film’s 46,520 Kick­starter back­ers) hop­ing for greater pathos will be left disappointed.

Wish I Was Here is a film of moments – some fun­ny, some trag­ic – that, like Braff’s char­ac­ter, is like­ly to leave you feel­ing disenchanted.