Linoleum

Back in middle and high school, I watched a ton of Comedy Central. It was how I found shows like Duckman and Kids in the Hall, and movies like dogma and Death to Smoochy. But primarily, it’s where I cultivated my love of stand-up. I devoured as many episodes of Premium Blend and Comedy Central Presents and Live at Gotham as I could. It’s been interesting to watch the trajectories of those comedians’ careers, most of whom I never heard from again (Sabrina Matthews), but a few who made it huge (Tig Notaro). Honestly, in most cases it’s been kinda cool to be able to say “I was a fan of theirs way back when”. I’d wager most people who know Tig’s joke about how her breasts tried to kill her as revenge for an old bit she used to do have never heard the original bit.

Jim Gaffigan falls into a third bucket; he never made a huge cultural splash, but managed to gain some notoriety with his Beyond the Pale (🎵hoooooooooot pocket🎵), then took a half step out of the spotlight while continuing to show up everywhere and perform excellent stand-up. I was even fortunate enough to catch him live a handful of years ago, and he was hilarious as ever. The moment I saw he had a starring role in a new movie, I was in, no further information necessary.

So imagine my delight when we open on the intro for a clearly homemade Bill Nye-esque TV show starring Cameron Edwin (Jim Gaffigan) called Above and Beyond. Here. We. Go!

In Linoleum, some odd things are happening to Cam. A car falls upside down from the sky right in front of him, and the driver looks exactly like him. The TV show he’s been working on so hard for so long is sold by his station to another station in town, and the replacement host Kent also looks exactly like him if he was a military man, which makes sense since he’s also played by Gaffigan. When Cam comes home from this meeting to find his house roped off due to a satellite having crashed in his backyard, something is awakened in him. After a lifetime of mundanity, he remembers the pledge he and his wife Erin (Rhea Seehorn) made to “do something fantastic”. And he sets out to build a rocket.

Meanwhile, his daughter Nora (Katelyn Nacon) is having her own adventure. She’s begun hanging around with Marc (Gabriel Rush), a new kid in town, who just so happens to be Kent’s son. Both of them feel like outsiders: Nora can’t stand the popular kids (or most anyone else at school), and Marc never has time to settle down due to them moving a bunch, not to mention his father’s strict, no nonsense style of parenting, including physical discipline. As their friendship grows, and various characters cross paths, all come together in an unexpected way.

From jump, Linoleum announces itself as a movie of two minds. On the one hand, those odd events certainly mean something. They all seem to revolve around Cam. There’s the doppelgangers, of course. But also the mysterious old woman who keeps showing up. And of course the satellite. His love of space is well established: we first see him mailing an astronaut application to NASA, later he can identify the Apollo mission the satellite came from and he’s got a space suit with a cracked visor in his basement work area.

But it’s also a story abut rediscovering your passion, about figuring out who you are. It’s about all the little things that repeat over and over again in your life and push you down a certain path. And it’s about wondering what could have been if you’d gone a different path. Cam is confronted with this quite literally, whereas Erin is presented with it in a more traditional manner.

The movie is broken up with little segments from Above and Beyond, most of which have a direct and fairly straightforward connection to the events on screen. The audio often comes in while the previous scene completes, or else lingers into the beginning of the next, to hammer home that it’s not arbitrarily there. For example, right after Marc is introduced to Nora’s class, we hear a piece about gravity and how it’s a force of attraction between two bodies. This is one of the exposition delivery mechanisms employed by the films, which works well enough and does given them an excuse to show us some fun, quirky little scenes. They were probably really run to write and film. However, they are a bit attention grabbing, and so you really feel the exposition, which isn’t ideal.

Relatedly, the resolution of the mystery doesn’t land as strongly as it could, in large part due to insisting on taking us on a tour of the clues that lead to this moment. So not exposition per se, but serving the same purpose: making sure we caught what it was doing. It doesn’t really trust its audience, which is a shame. Because I actually do quite like the way it plays out, and even more that the movie doesn’t end immediately afterwards. We get another scene or two which are excellent, placing a nice little button on everything. So it kinda wins you back, even after just spoon-feeding you.

And it’s charmingly funny! But not ostentatiously so. Gaffigan never feels like he’s lapsing into stand-up, and never feels like he’s straining against it, either. Rather, the whole movie flows with a sense of entertaining interactions and observations and strange situations. Gaffigan just is funny, and the rest of the cast really supports that.

This was a nice little interesting movie. Could have been better, sure, but I’m glad I sat down to watch it.