Starring: Jim Gaffigan, Rhea Seehorn, Katelyn Nacon, Gabriel Rush
Directed by: Colin West
Rated PG-13, 101 minutes
“Linoleum” is not an overly experimental movie, but it is possessed of abundant poetic license. Take its title, a word never uttered in the movie itself but evocative nevertheless of something mundane, of the things with which we make contact so frequently they blend into the background. It’s a fitting title for a story about a midlife crisis.
Many of the other hallmarks of your typical American midlife crisis make an appearance, too, also tinged with figurative and lyrical weight. The protagonist, Cameron Edwin (Jim Gaffigan, “Chappaquiddick”), spots another man—a younger, more handsome version of himself, as it happens—driving a little red Corvette through his quaint suburb; in another scene the same car falls from the sky, landing with such an enormous crash that even the camera shakes on impact. An old rocket module falls to earth, too, landing in the Edwins’ backyard. Cameron, an astronomer and public access television science presenter á la Bill Nye, cannibalizes the module for parts in order to start building his own personal rocketship in the garage.
Cameron’s wife, Erin (Rhea Seehorn, “Better Call Saul”), meanwhile, has little patience for her husband’s flights of fancy. She has drawn up divorce papers, a prospect that looms over (and perhaps has instigated) Cameron’s crisis. Likewise, his teenage daughter Nora (Katelyn Nacon, “The Walking Dead”), mature beyond her years and more grounded in reality than perhaps both of her parents, has taken to calling him by his first name.
Unfolding in short vignettes and sketches that fill in the self-contradictory contours of the Edwins’ suburban ennui, “Linoleum” proceeds like a mystery. What, we wonder, connects all these strange events—the objects falling from the sky, the presence of Cameron’s doppelgänger, the repeated sightings of a woman staring at Cameron from a distance—and what does it have to do with his rocketship? Even when we think we’re close to getting some answers, “Linoleum” only piles on more questions.
This slyly surreal atmosphere is where “Linoleum” hits its stride, its many oddities washing over the viewer to create something both affecting and heady, both plain-spoken and cerebral. “It’s not that simple,” characters say repeatedly, making excuses for their inability to act upon their truest desires. Yet they also repeat their wish to do “something fantastic,” each of them in an internal tug of war between their ambition and their cowardice. Writer-director Colin West (“Double Walker”) reveals this struggle at strange and simultaneous angles, like faces in a Picasso. “It’s a Moebius strip,” Cameron’s aging, Alzheimer’s-stricken father says, holding up a flimsy strip of paper, but he could just as well be describing the movie’s narrative arc.
A collection of charming performances lifts “Linoleum” from novelty to convincing drama, not least of which is Jim Gaffigan’s dual turns as the hapless, frazzled Cameron and his look-alike foil, the clean-cut, menacing Kent Armstrong. The standout among the cast, though, is Katelyn Nacon, whose Nora is the movie’s quietly assured moral center, as strong a presence in her scenes alongside Gaffigan and Seehorn as she is in scenes of her high school hallway dramas. Nora’s story finds her facing big questions—about her place in her family, about her sexuality, about her future in a world where rockets and cars fall from the sky—but Nacon is an anchor, an everywoman that leads us capably through these peculiar quandaries in this peculiar story.
“Linoleum” is, however, the rare mystery that suffers for being answered. A twist at the film’s end explains away all of its paradoxes, its blending of reality and fantasy, providing an unnecessary key to the suburban surrealism that has produced such vivid and inscrutable moments. Colin West, with both a mystery and a drama of existential soul-searching on his hands, tries to have it both ways. As a result, both the final revelation and the preceding 90 minutes of character-driven introspection feel secondary to each other.
Still, even if the final act undoes some of its compelling ambiguities, “Linoleum” also makes the case for not letting life’s definitive answers speak for the entire ineffable experience of living. Like Cameron dragging his telescope out into the yard to look up at an impassive sky, the movie searches for wisdom in between the lines of objective truth. “It’s not that simple,” Cameron keeps saying, but eventually, he learns, it is.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 3/24/23.