"King of California"

Mike Cahill's directorial debut, "King of California," is populated by two fascinating characters--a solid, dependable 16-year-old girl and her bi-polar, totally undependable father--and casts two actors in these roles, Evan Rachel Wood and Michael Douglas, who give performances that will rank among the best of their careers. But instead of letting these characters live and breathe and exist in all their quirkiness, instead of letting us witness the hairbrained paths their lives would take them naturally, the film wraps them up in an implausible plot full of ridiculous contrivances. It shouldn't happen to two individuals as unique as Miranda and Charlie.

As the film begins, Charlie is released following two years of treatment at a Southern California county mental hospital and returns to live with his daughter, Miranda, who has made a somewhat normal life for herself, considering she's been flimflamming child-welfare agencies all this time. Miranda's mother, a hand model (clever), walked out on the family years ago because, according to Charlie, she couldn't stand living way out in the middle of nowhere but more likely to preserve what was left of her own sanity before Charlie's antics forced her into homicidal acts. But by the time Charlie walks out of the hospital, their home is no longer in the middle of nowhere--suburban sprawl is slithering in all around them.

Now that's really all the plot this film needed. It would have been fun to see how this pair negotiated the looming suffocation civilization brings to the uncivilized, but the film couldn't stop there. Charlie did a lot of reading while in the hospital and he learned that back in the 1600s a Spanish padre buried some treasure somewhere in the neighborhood. Following the clues outlined in the books, Charlie determines the treasure now resides under a Costco and he hatches a scheme in which he and Miranda can dig it up.

Even that might have been OK if we also hadn't been thrown a lot of diversions that reinforce the fact that this film is really about its plot and not its characters. We get the pawning of the prized possessions, the fast-food employment, a really unnecessary bit involving "swingers," and an ending that reveals the film wasn't about the journey after all, it was about the destination.

The film was produced by Alexander Payne who has given us such remarkable films as "Election," About Schmidt" and the magnificent "Sideways," in which the characters went the way the characters would go naturally, and not the way the plot dragged them. If only he allowed that to happen to Miranda and Charlie.

Grade: C