It gets a little complicated when assessing Laggies. Sam Rockwell has become such a mesmerizing force onscreen he often elevates a work he appears in by several notches. Last year’s The Way, Way Back would have been a rather good film without him; with him, it rose to one of the year’s best. In Laggies, Rockwell plays Craig, the lawyer single dad of Annika (Chloe Grace Moretz). The set-up is Megan (Keira Knightley) accidentally stumbles into the much younger Annika’s world while bored and frustrated with her own. On the day she’s to attend a multi-day self-actualization conference of some sort she has second thoughts and not just about the gabfest. She’s just accepted a proposal from her stuffy boyfriend (Mark Webber) to elope after the conference. In addition, her nosy, advice-pushing friends annoy her.
So the almost-30 Megan bolts, and before you know it she is is not only hanging out with high schooler Annika, she’s crashing in her room. Craig’s reaction is pure Rockwellian. Able to blend a naturally stern response with a compassionately humorous one, Craig has charisma to burn. Rockwell steals every scene he’s in, and he and Knightley are dynamite together. This despite a fine performance from Knightley, who’s getting Oscar buzz for her role in the forthcoming The Imitation Game. Moretz (who also does very well supporting Juliette Binoche in the forthcoming Clouds of Sils Maria) gives Annika depth and believability. In lesser acting hands the connection between the two women could have easily seemed phony. Knightley and Moretz lend strength to their character’s ability to find instant compatibility. When Annika asks Megan to pretend to be her mom at a parent-teacher conference, Knightley pulls it off nicely. A later scene with Annika’s estranged mom (Gretchen Mol) provides plenty of insight on why Annika is a prime candidate for hanging out with a woman more than a decade older than herself.
Director Lynn Shelton (Humpday, Your Sister’s Sister) has fashioned a film that’s three parts fun and one part insightful. It differs from her previous work in that it embraces a conventionality that her previous work avoided. It’s also is her first film that she didn’t write. Some Megan’s scenes with her friends-since-high school border on clichéd, and her hyper-deliberate, impossibly sincere fiancé is pure cookie-cutter. And did we really need to include a prom here? Yet its sense of good fun and interesting characters are more than a mere veneer. They stick. Laggies is the perfect chaser to wash down the many heavy fall movies that go from deep to deeper. It’s lightness is no flaw.