Consider this a disclaimer for all the parents considering showing this movie to their family: 6 Balloons is one of the 10 most misleading movie headlines of all time. For all those parents with Netflix accounts who are like “Looks, it’s 6 Balloons! It has a birthday party, the mom from Malcolm in the middle, that girl from Broad City, Otter from Animal House, and a Franco brother – the non-misogynistic one – plus a cute baby! Sounds perfect for a Sunday afternoon.” Please, seriously, watch this AFTER your kids go to bed, cause you’ll realize just how cruelly Netflix has misled you. You will be engaged with what you see, but not in a cutesy fun way.
It’s Jack’s (Dawan Owens) 35th birthday party, and his girlfriend Katie (Abbi Jacobson) is throwing a surprise party for him. Things are already stressful, with Katie and her mom (Jane Kaczmarek) being very obsessive compulsive people, plus her dad (Tim Matheson) being aloof. But all of Katie’s strict planning and schedule is thrown off when she picks up her brother Seth (Dave Franco) and his daughter Ella (Charlotte and Madeline Carell). Why are things thrown off? Because Seth is showing signs that he might have fallen off the wagon.
I hesitate to look up writer/director Marja-Lewis Ryan’s background, because it sounds like she went through some terrible times with someone. Movies about addiction usually center around the addict, usually because it is a showier role for an actor to pull off. The supporting cast revolves around the addict and sometimes we see how hard it is for them, but only peripherally. In 6 Balloons, Seth is NOT the focal point of the story: Katie is. Seth is written as being a habitual relapser, and we think the self-help tapes being narrated to use are for Seth, and they very well may be, but the story focuses on how they apply to Katie. She truly loves her brother and can’t understand why he cannot get himself out of this tailspin, so 6 Balloons establishes that Katie is herself an enabler for Seth, succumbing to his pleas, charms, and manipulations because she wants to believe she can help him. We see Katie go to extreme lengths to help Seth, getting sucked into his addiction so much that she might miss the event she’s been carefully planning in the first place. I with Ryan had opened the story to be more than just about one night, and focused on the day-in-day-out difficulties of someone dealing with a drug addicted loved one, but using the one night approach gives 6 Balloons a focused narrative to let the actors understand and dig into their characters.
This movie is basically a two person play with a kid chiming in with cuteness. Abbi Jacobson and Dave Franco are best known for being funny people. Watch this. Or this. They make everything they are in funnier…except for this movie. This was probably a calculated risk on their part to see if they could pull it off. Turns out…I think it’s a win for both. Franco as the addict really has to 1) make sure we dislike what his addiction does to him and the people around him and 2) engender enough sympathy that Katie would consider helping him over and over again. Franco succeeds at both; I don’t think I’ve remembered him playing someone this dislikable, and yet, when Ella comes into play, Franco gives Seth conviction and warmth lacking everywhere else: the mix is right. Abbi Jacobson had to prove she can pull of playing it straight in a way that makes us root for her and she doesn’t become overtly melodramatic, a tougher less showy job. However, Jacobson is quite impressive, really understanding what makes Katie tick and how being in control is her real driving force, so when someone navigates out of her control, she wants to bring them back into orbit, but that creates just an insane amount of stress that Jacobson wonderfully dials down and channels into low level outbursts or line deliveries. It’s unexpectedly modulated from Jacobson, with whom I now have to raise her career bar because she’s not tied to any specific genre anymore.
6 Balloons is one giant calculated risk. Dave Franco and Abbi Jacobson took calculated risks on their careers and pulled it off. Marja-Lewis Ryan took a calculated risk that a movie about people surrounding an addict would be just as compelling as a movie about addiction, and that risk paid off. One risk won’t pay off: when Netflix parents let their kids watch a movie called 6 balloons and have to explain what those 6 packets Dave Franco just bought actually are.