POOLMAN - Mark Reviews Movies

Poolman, Vertical

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | May 10, 2024

In plain terms, Poolman is a story about a provisional, bumbling detective who becomes caught up in a conspiracy that he can't comprehend. The joke of co-writer/director/star Chris Pine's movie is that his Darren Barrenman is so incompetent and distracted by, well, a whole lot of nothing of importance that said conspiracy could be elaborate or quite simple. Our man is just too dim a bulb to figure out either possibility.

With the basics of the plot out of the way, Pine's directorial debut is a mess of aimlessness, quirkiness, and tonal inconsistency. It's a comedy that seems to be made up of inside jokes, which must be known only to the filmmaker and co-screenwriter Ian Gotler, who don't bother to explain the foundations of these characters, their characters' relationships to each other, or their motives for doing anything they do, which isn't much in the first place. It's a confounding experience and unnecessarily so, because the gist of it is so simple. It's quite the feat, perhaps, for more than an hour of a movie to pass without offering a connection to anything of substance.

Maybe that's the deeper joke of Pine and Gotler's screenplay—that the lives of struggling actors, apartment landlords moonlighting as yoga instructors, therapists with questionable credentials, and, yes, a pool guy with aspirations that shift with a light breeze of chance in Los Angeles really don't matter much except to themselves. If something like that is the case, Pine's movie is some kind of accomplishment, then, because it really doesn't give us a reason to care about its existence.

Take Darren, for example, whom we first meet cleaning a pool with meticulous attention to detail. It's the only thing he seems to be good at, but even that's up for debate. After all, some markings along the side of the pool show the water level decreasing with time.

That's partly a bit of foreshadowing of the plot, which is taken from another film about a conspiracy revolving around water in L.A.—or maybe that's not the case at all. Either way, it once again proves the rule that filmmakers shouldn't show a great movie in their bad ones, and they definitely shouldn't directly reference it as much as this screenplay does. The intentional comparison never helps but always hurts.

Anyway, what is there to say about Darren? By the end of the story, not even the screenwriters seem to know, despite multiple dream sequences, which supposedly get to the core of his deepest fears and anxieties, and a summarizing narration that tries to convince us all he ever wanted in life was what he never believed he had: a family. There's a sentimental streak to the movie that's almost entirely cloying, and the only element keeping those instances from being completely so is the sincerity of Pine's performance. We might not care about or even understand who Darren is and what makes him tick, but the actor does—or, at least, fools us into believing he has some kind of notion.

He's adrift, basically, despite living in a camper next to the pool of an apartment complex, where his friends include therapist Diane (Annette Bening) and her partner Jack (Danny DeVito), an older man still struggling to make it in the entertainment industry, while he's sort of seeing Susan (Jennifer Jason Leigh), whom he loves enough to overlook the fact that she doesn't want a serious relationship. To keep himself busy, Darren meditates, writes daily letters to a famous activist, and is making a documentary about his efforts to bring all sorts of reforms to the attention of city hall.

Eventually, a plot reveals itself. June (DeWanda Wise), the new assistant to city council president Stephen Toronkowski (Stephen Tobolowsky, whose casting can't be a coincidence), believes her boss is crooked and taking bribes for some shady land development deal. She asks him to go undercover to find evidence, and he messes it all up, as his comfortable but uncertain life falls apart around him.

There's just no reason to become invested in any of it, because Poolman exists as a strange contradiction—too ambitious, in terms of attempting to be a character study and a satire of L.A. living, and seemingly without much, if any, purpose. Pine's charming presence on screen can go a long way, but in his first effort behind the camera and as a screenwriter, he appears to be absent.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products