A teenage girl (Evan Rachel Wood) who has been secretly raising herself finds her life thrown into disarray when her father (Michael Douglas) is released after several years in a mental hospital and comes to stay with her.  Things spiral out of control when he becomes obsessed with finding a long-lost Spanish treasure.

CRITIQUE

King of California is a movie that should work better than it does, because it has a lot going for it; the script (by writer/director Mike Cahill) is often-interesting, the producers include Election/Sideways director Alexander Payne, and the cast is led by Michael Douglas and Evan Rachel Wood, who between them have about 95% of the dialogue in the movie.  Yet somehow this is less than the sum of its parts; though it isn’t a bad movie, it just never manages to be a very solid one either.

Part of the problem is tone.  Though the soundtrack works hard to convince us that this is a jaunty, quirky, character tale, the central dynamic here is just a bit too depressing for that.  The main storyline involves 16-year-old Miranda (Wood), who has been raising herself, working in McDonald’s rather than going to high school, though things don’t get better when her still-fairly-nuts former jazzman father Charlie (Douglas) is released after several years in an institution and comes to stay with her.

Though Douglas works hard to inject life into Charlie, the trouble is that too often he just feels like a movie creation, a character who can be nuts one minute, and yet somehow woo a female cop the next.  The tale is trying to keep it a bit ambiguous when it comes to how nuts Charlie is, particularly when it becomes to a Spanish doubloon treasure that he becomes obsessed with along the way (a quest that drives most of the action), but it skirts too much over his mental illness.  Either way he’s just not much of a father, and it’s a tragic element that often unbalances the material here, even though Miranda and Charlie do have some good scenes together along the way.

And there are a lot of things here that work, particularly in a long second-half sequence in which the characters throw themselves into the pursuit of a treasure that may or may not actually exist.  Though Douglas gets to give the big performance (though he’s a little over-the-top at times, cackling through his wild beard), it is Wood who generally manages to hold the film together with a more subtle performance; someday she’s going to find the right role in the right film, and it’s going to make her a star.

King of California isn’t that film, though there are enough moments that work to land it in the okay-but-wish-it-were-better category.

THE VIDEO

It’s unclear from the packaging what the framing specifications of King of California are, though the picture quality is generally fine.

THE AUDIO

King of California is presented in English 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround.  Dialogue, music and sound effects come through clear.  There are English and Spanish subtitles.

THE EXTRAS

There is a Commentary featuring writer/director Mike Cahill, cinematographer James Whitaker, production designer Dan Bishop and first assistant director Richard L. Fox.  Though they deal with a lot of nuts-and-bolts production stuff, it’s a good listen.

There’s a 10-minute Making Of featurette that is a fairly standard blend of interviews and scenes from the movie.

There are four minutes of Outtakes, largely of the actors laughing during takes.

FINAL THOUGHT

An often-interesting effort, if not nearly as good as it could have been.  Not bad if you’re in the mood.