Zach Braff’s “Wish I Was Here” wishes it were “Garden State,” but if this movie amounts to an elongated sitcom, it’s a pretty good sitcom.
Braff plays an unemployed LA actor with a wife (Kate Hudson) and two children who is lucky if he can get a gig playing Guy with Dandruff in a commercial. Life takes a nasty swerve when his dad (Mandy Patinkin) announces he can no longer pay for the kids’ yeshiva fees because he’s dying of cancer and needs the money for an experimental New Age treatment.
Aidan (Braff) tells Sarah (Hudson) that if she thinks he should give up acting, she should just say so. “I want you to give up acting,” she says. The rabbi at the school laughs off Aidan’s request for charity, saying a real man works to take care of his kids. Meanwhile, these secular parents — who are sending their kids to a Jewish school only because their local public one is terrible — notice with alarm that their adolescent daughter is a little too serious about this whole religion thing, insisting (for insistence) on modest dress and even shaving her head as many Orthodox women do.
After many years on a sitcom, Braff (who directed and co-wrote the script with his brother Adam) has a knee-jerk tendency to go for the cheap, writer’s-room joke, even if it makes no sense (the daughter is brilliant one moment, but the next she confuses al Qaeda with Al Roker). And an interspersed sci-fi fantasy sequence that looks like it ate half the film’s budget is lame.
But there are enough sharp one-liners and funny situations to keep things entertaining even as Braff delves (lightly) into genuine dilemmas confronting many a married couple. Hudson — poised and frustrated at the same time — shines as the exasperated wife, the two of them convincingly creating the feeling of a marriage that’s worn-in but not quite worn out. Patinkin also makes the most of his screen time, as does Josh Gad as Aidan’s loser brother, a potential genius turned Internet troll who lives in a trailer down by the beach.
Braff should probably fire his star and find a subtler actor to do his next soul-searching slice-of-life comedy, but his mugging seems a reasonable price to pay for a reflective, ingratiating comedy that peeks into the darkness while reassuring us that nice people can work out their problems.