Apparently the road to Sacramento is filled with indie pitfalls. Michael Angarano’s first feature really wants to be something important, but along the way he has to learn a lot of the lessons all indies must go through, to the exasperation of audience members. That exasperation goes down a lot easier when Angarano and Michael Cera are feeding it to you, I guess.
Angarano, in addition to writing and directing, stars as Rickey, one of those California free spirits you’ve read about before. Nearing the end of his therapy stay, Rickey hopes to reconnect with his best, and sadly, only friend. Unfortunately Glenn (Michael Cera) is diving deep into his new parenting life, exasperating his lovely wife Rosie (Kristen Stewart) with his growing nerviness as the due date nears. As such, when Rickey decides on an impromptu trip to Sacramento to pay respects to his dying father, Rosie eagerly persuades Glenn to go, in hopes he’ll loosen up a bit.
We’ll get to the pitfalls, but there’s still lots of good in Sacramento. The movie gets a lot right about the evolution of friendships. Until about 23, friendships are easy to come by, and born of convenience, as you’re in classes with kids your age. But once college is over, it’s time for deciding what type of adult you want to be. Rickey opted for the natural aimless life meeting beautiful women like Tallie (Maya Erskine) in his travels. Glenn instead decided it was time for “domestic bliss,” ready to move onto the next step in his life. That puts the two of them, as Rickey says, on a “once a year lunch” timeline, with as Glenn mentions, a “phase out” slowly happening. I’ve personally seen this happen to several friends, who it would seem just go no contact, and you only see them at weddings if at all. There’s no deep hate loss though; the minute Glenn and Rickey are back together, they’re back doing the old beats of their friendship, albeit briefly. Where the complications arise are deciding what type of friends you want to be, and that road trip the two dig deep into how their relationship might work in the years ahead, if at all.
Unfortunately those good moments operate in the middle of other moments that make me like Sacramento less and less the more I think about the movie. While Cera and Angarano have a blast playing off one another, the script makes them sound like 25 year olds who learned all the therapy buzzwords. No one talks like they’re a human for more than a few minutes, happier to preach their thoughts in that film way that renders the points phony and irritating. Oh, and all that stuff Angarano’s script has to say about growing up? Doesn’t apply to women in this story, who are written to be pregnant, with a baby, or a hot girl to listen to one of the male leads. They’re given no agency in this movie as a counterpoint. But the worst pitfall is that final act. You know the pent up Cera has to hit his big emotional breaking point. The way he gets there though is so preposterous and stupid that it undercuts any feelings you might have on the matter, other than be infuriated at all the characters involved for letting it happen. Which we then have to nicely wrap up in a way that so wouldn’t work in the real world that my eyes rolled out of my body for what I was forced to stomach.
While I liked the Michaels. I do wonder what would have happened if we got the Kristen Stewart/Maya Erskine version of this movie? Wait, no I don’t. It’s Love Lies Bleeding! And that’s a GREAT movie. So lesson learned from Sacramento: if Kristen Stewart is in your movie set in the American West, move to New Mexico in the 1990s and bring Rose Glass in to direct instead of slapping a belly on her and ignoring her for some insane reason.