Colin West’s Linoleum is a film that wants to be a story about a man in the depths of a mid-life crisis, a mind-bending meditation on time, space and reality and a coming-of-age drama about two misfit teens who strike up a friendship that seems destined to turn into something else. This is a lot of material for any one narrative to cover, so much so that I have a certain admiration towards West simply for trying to cram all of these elements and more into a single narrative. The problems is that while the film’s fence-swinging ambitions are admirable, West spends more time trying to keep all of his dramatic plates spinning in the air than in resolving them in a satisfactory matter, resulting in a conclusion that is nowhere near as transcendent or emotionally gripping as he clearly thinks it is.
As the film opens, astronomer Cameron Edwin (Jim Gaffigan) is in a rut—his dreams of becoming an astronaut have been reduced to hosting a TV kid’s science show that has inexplicably been given a midnight time slot, his equally frustrated wife Erin (Rhea Seehorn) wants a divorce and his father (Roger Hendricks Simon) is suffering from an increasingly progressive form of dementia. Things begin to take a turn for the weird one day when a sports car seemingly drops from out of the sky in front of him and the man behind the wheel appears to look just like him. The next day, when he goes to work, not only is the man in that car, Kent (also played by Gaffigan), there at the office, it turns out that he has just been given Cameron’s show to boot. As a final cherry atop this sundae of ennui, Cameron arrives home and learns that what appears to be a Russian rocket has crashed in his back yard and his house now condemned.
Cameron’s response to all of this is, shall we say, unique. Returning to his home and finding all the government officials mysteriously gone, he decides to use his scientific knowledge and the remains of the rocket to build a space craft that will allow him to finally achieve his dream of going into space. Meanwhile, Erin finds her vague plans for divorce put into sharp focus when she is offered a dream job that would require her to relocate. While all this is going on, Cameron’s angsty teen daughter Nora (Katelyn Nacon) winds up befriending Marc (Gabriel Rush), the misfit son of Kent (who has just moved in across the street) and the two find themselves battling both the class mean girl and the obvious attraction that they clearly have for each other. There is also a lot of additional weirdness going on as well, including (but not limited to) the constant appearance of a mysterious old woman who seems to be watching over Cameron wherever he goes.
So in essence, Linoleum is a hybrid of, of all things, American Beauty and Donnie Darko, right down to having things inexplicably falling from the sky into the depths of suburbia and a key plot development that occurs on Halloween. As combinations go, this is certainly an unexpected one and indeed, one of the things that keeps the film moving alone is a desire to see exactly how West is going to figure out how to tie them together. The problem is that he has so much good and interesting stuff going on here—each of the major plot threads could have easily been spun out into a separate movie—that there simply isn’t enough time to give them the kind of exploration that they deserve and they are all kind of left wanting as a result. This is especially evident in the final reels, where the threads collide rather than converge as they build to a final revelation that is not nearly as surprising as the film thinks it is.
Linoleum is ultimately not a success but it is an ambitious one that has a number of virtues working for it. The performances by Gaffigan, Seehorn and especially Nacon are quite strong and provide the film with a recognizable emotional center. There are a number of good individual scenes here and there and West keeps things moving along in an effective low-key manner. Even if I cannot entirely recommend it, I can at least say that it is always in there trying, though sometimes too much for its own good, and it makes me curious as to what West will do next, preferably with a screenplay that makes you feel as if you have encountered an actual story and not a juggling act.