108 min | R | August 20, 2021 | United Artists Releasing
A con man drifts in and out of his daughter’s life, lying to her even as she grows old enough to see through him. Jennifer Vogel loves her father and writes the truth about him anyway. Sean Penn casts his own kids and films it like a memory he cannot stop romanticizing.
John Vogel is a counterfeiter, a bank robber, and a serial liar who keeps reappearing in his daughter’s life with promises he cannot keep. Jennifer Vogel grows up in the wreckage of his charm and his absence. The film tracks her across two decades as she tries to reconcile the father who dazzles her with the criminal who abandons her. Sean Penn adapts Jennifer Vogel’s memoir into a story about the cost of loving a person who is incapable of telling the truth. The material is wrenching. The execution buries it.
Dylan Penn plays Jennifer as a young woman who learns to read her father’s faces the way a forecaster reads weather. She holds the film together with a watchfulness that never tips into self-pity. Sean Penn plays John as a man who believes his own pitch right up to the moment it collapses. He is convincing as a charmer and convincing as a wreck. The problem is that the two Penns share real blood, and the film leans on that fact instead of building the relationship through scenes. Josh Brolin appears briefly as Uncle Beck and grounds a few minutes in something plain and unsentimental.
Sean Penn directs from a script by Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth. He shoots the past in golden, sun-flared handheld images that turn every memory into a perfume commercial. The film cuts constantly to home-movie textures and lens flares whenever the emotion rises. The technique signals feeling instead of earning it. The score swells under nearly every scene and tells the audience how to respond before the actors get the chance. The style smothers the story it is supposed to serve.
The result is a film at war with its own best instincts. Underneath the haze there is a hard, specific story about a daughter who becomes a journalist partly to learn how to verify the man who raised her. Penn keeps reaching for lyricism when the material wants plainness. He trusts the camera and the music more than he trusts his actors or his text. Dylan Penn deserves a cleaner frame than the one her father builds around her.