Jimpa review – Olivia Colman soars in otherwise muddled queer family drama

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More so than other film festivals, Sundance can be a kingmaking force, shining light on an unknown film-maker and then entering into a mutually beneficial relationship with them. Directors return, shifted from smaller to larger venues, off-peak to primetime slots, and watching this steady climb can be a gratifying reward.

The Australian director Sophie Hyde has earned this more than most. Her first film, 52 Tuesdays, a thoughtful drama about a transitioning parent’s relationship with their daughter, won her the festival’s best director prize before she returned five years later with Animals, a sharp and spiky adaptation of Emma Jane Unsworth’s painfully perceptive novel of a fracturing friendship. She returned three years later with Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, an unusually frank and explicit comedy drama with a standout Emma Thompson (who, along with Animals’ Holliday Grainger deserved far more serious awards attention). In just over a decade, Hyde had established herself as someone whose name had become an instant sign of a certain top-tier Sundance quality, a skilled actors’ director whose films burrowed deeper than most.

Jimpa, nabbing an attention-demanding first-day premiere, is undoubtedly her biggest film to date. It stars an Oscar winner in Olivia Colman and an Oscar nominee in John Lithgow, playing a daughter and father whose story takes them from Australia to Europe, from the 70s up the current. It’s also Hyde’s most personal – a semi-autobiographical story that mirrors that of her own family – even starring Hyde’s own transgender non-binary child, playing a version of themselves. But it’s also, sadly, her weakest work, a promisingly knotty drama of intergenerational family queerness that offers so much but delivers on so little.

High expectations are met in the first act though, as Hyde effectively scene-sets, following Colman’s sensitive film-maker Hannah as she prepares to travel to Amsterdam with her husband and teen, Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde), to see her father. But on the way, Frances tells her that they want to stay with their grandfather, nicknamed Jimpa, for far longer, hoping to find a queer community in a big, diverse city that they’re struggling to find back home. It’s a crushing blow for Hannah, whose avoidance of conflict has become increasingly untenable, but rather than warn Frances off, she plans to let Jimpa do that all by himself – an outsized personality who she’s convinced will end up hurting them somehow.

For a while, the naturalism of Hyde and cowriter Matthew Cormack’s script proves to be easily involving with dialogue that follows a believable rhythm, uncomfortable and deep-rooted issues acknowledged but sidestepped. Colman is marvellous in this particular mode, acting with such swift and convincing emotional instincts that you never once doubt her full grasp of what Hannah is thinking or feeling at any exact moment, often switching in the briefest blink of an eye. Lithgow is fine if not as piercingly effective in playing it big, less convincing and emotionally devastating as he was playing another gay man facing the ravages of age in Ira Sachs’ wonderful Love Is Strange.

Hyde has the ability to craft transporting and emotionally wrenching montages, giving us brief snippets of a life as we travel back in time. We see flashes of the family at the film’s centre but also the older gay men who surround Jimpa, the confused boys who became sexually liberated then overwhelmingly terrified twentysomethings dealing with the outbreak of Aids. The wrestle between how older and younger queer people define and discuss themselves and their sexuality begins promisingly, as the men meet Frances and gently prod, but the film quickly goes from intriguing discussion to clumsy lecture – with didactic dialogue removing any earlier subtlety, characters sounding less like real people and more like earnest dissertations.

There is something interesting about Colman’s director being so reticent to centre her life and work on conflict (she is also developing a project about her father) but it soon becomes a dramatic problem for the film which coasts on shaggy, diminishing bohemian warmth for far too long. While Hyde initially seemed to show an adept awareness of what to share from her life and how to share it, the balance soon drifts. Stories are repeated, irrelevant details and uninteresting subplots are explored, and the film starts meandering into boredom, busied by too much that we’re just not as invested in. With a baggy two-hour-plus runtime (at least 20 minutes could be easily excised), Jimpa risks becoming a rather indulgent home movie. When inevitable last-act tragedy arrives, it’s so poorly paced and needlessly drawn out that we just don’t respond as dramatically as we’re clearly expected to – though a fantastic last-minute turn from Kate Box as a far more conflict-driven sibling does provide a jolt of energy at a time when the film sorely needs it.

If Jimpa itself pushes us away, Colman tries to keeps us close, a warm and astute performance of raw, red-eyed emotion remaining entirely real until the end. If only we could have joined her there.