PREMIERE'S REVIEW (posted 9/14/07)

Writer-director Mike Cahill's debut feature is a deft, often surprising modern-day picaresque with a challenging daughter-father relationship at its heart. Evan Rachel Wood continues a streak of impressive performances as Miranda, a teen in a remote and ramshackle Southern California outpost (one of course being encroached on by tract housing) who's been pretty much left to her own devices at the beginning of the film. Her mom's gone, and her dad Charlie (Douglas), a jazz bassist who's the sort of guy who gets called a "dreamer" a lot, has temporarily been confined to a mental institution. Ever resourceful, Miranda has managed to keep their house, buy a car, and lead a pretty orderly if unexciting life. Charlie's return upends all that; dishes pile up in the sink, old gig mates stop by to toke up, and most disruptive of all, Charlie has come up with a scheme that he believes will make his and Miranda's fortune.

Said scheme, gleaned, or more likely imagined, from Charlie's studies in California history, involves a cask of gold doubloons carried by doomed Spanish missionaries and buried, as Charlie's surveying determines, beneath a local Costco. Undeterred by the legality of a treasure hunt that will involve breaking and entering, Charlie soldiers on, enlisting Miranda as a sometimes undercover accomplice. Miranda's of several minds about this. More grown up and more sane than her dad, she's frequently frustrated and hurt by him, but she not only sticks with him, she sticks her neck out for him. One of the best things about this picture is its portrait of this complex filial bond between father and daughter, shown (sometimes via flashback) rather than explicated.

Cahill, whose late '90s book A Nixon Man received widespread praise, brings to his picture a novelist's eye for quirky detail, as when Douglas's character strides into the kitchen to find a wildcat crouched on the table, having come in through the window to get out of the rain. Cahill also creatively plays with storytelling modes, using, for example, old TV-cop-drama-style freeze frames for the treasure-procuring schemes scenes, and animated old woodcuts of a Spanish historical tome to illustrate Douglas's explanation of the "source" of his "treasure." The result is enjoyable and frequently affecting. The one weak note is Douglas' performance — he does more than phone it in, but his essential Douglas-ness makes the character less believable than he might have been.

— Glenn Kenny