Mark Reviews Movies: LINOLEUM

Linoleum, Shout! Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 23, 2023

A car seems to fall from the sky at the start of Linoleum, and it's the kind of mystery that demands an answer and promises more things like it. Writer/director Colin West certainly gives us a solution to the occasionally odd circumstances, broadly interconnected stories, and general uncertainty of his narrative. Considering how much that story seems to want to say about fate and family and finding meaning within a life, though, the answer to what's actually happening in this story bypasses all of those ideas for a gimmick that only vaguely makes sense.

The man who sees the car crash to earth from some unknown height is Cameron (Jim Gaffigan), the host of a science-based TV show aimed at kids. Even stranger (if such a thing is possible) than the car plummeting to the ground is that the passenger looks a lot like Cameron.

He's Kent (also Gaffigan), an award-winning scientist, whose life is sort of an inverse of Cameron's. Our protagonist rides a bike everywhere, but his double drives a classic sports car. Cameron wanted to be an astronaut, and Kent was one.

Cameron's wife Erin (Rhea Seehorn) wants a divorce, and the two have a rebellious teenage daughter named Nora (Katelyn Nacon), as well as a silent son. Kent's a widower with a polite and thoughtful son named Marc (Gabriel Rush), who becomes friends with Nora and bonds with Cameron over an American spacecraft that crashes in the TV host's backyard. Even though Cameron is envious of Kent, the man's son says Cameron is essentially like the nicer version of his own dad.

The narrative here is divided between Cameron's attempts to build a rocket out of the debris in his backyard, Erin trying to decide if she's going to take a new job, and Nora and Marc developing a close friendship. There are a lot of coincidences (beyond the sudden appearance of Cameron's doppelganger) and side characters, such as an older man (played by Roger Hendricks Simon)—presumably but never overtly identified as Cameron's father—with dementia, and quirks, but West throws so many questions at us about the underlying truth of this scenario that they feel more random than planned.

As for the themes beneath all of this, they're mostly repetitive, with the major characters wrestling with disappointment and/or uncertainty, and underdeveloped, because the movie is far too busy adding new peculiarities and/or trying to throw us off the scent of the big revelation. Linoleum eventually gets to a final answer that explains why certain events and connections don't feel in line with reality, and West spends so much time making sure we get the point that it almost seems as if the filmmaker didn't consider a more considerable issue than the logic of what we've seen—or lack thereof. In the end, the whole game comes across as a manipulative cheat.

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