Film is known for being a more visual experience. So for a movie to contain elements like an ongoing narrator that will essentially explain many characters’ intentions, ideas, and thought processes, it needs to have plenty of other elements that it will make it stand out and hold the audience’s attention. It can work well in comedies, as narration can be used to get in some fun running commentary on a situation. Though in more dramatic movies, it winds up taking away from some of the film’s emotional impact, as characters’ thoughts are explained to the audience, rather than acted out in a more natural setting. This winds up being one of the many problems in one of Netflix’s latest releases this year, Juanita.
The film follows the titular character (Alfre Woodard), a working-class woman in Columbus, Ohio who’s fed up with her job, as well as the many problems that surround her family life. She wants to get away from everyone and start all over. She randomly picks Butte, Montana on the map and decides she wants to go there, so she can start her life all over. She stops at a French restaurant run by an acclaimed chef named Jess (Adam Beach), begins a romance with him, and attempts to focus on her time in Butte and not think about any of her troubles back in Columbus.
Tonally, this movie is clearly confused. It’s not sure if it wants to be a quirky comedy or a serious, emotional drama. It opens with a colorful sequence that explains all of Juanita’s life, that follows by the titular character breaking the fourth wall and making some humorous observations about her family. The film also contains the occasional daydreaming sequence where Juanita imagines talking to Blair Underwood, only for him to ask her for money just like her kids do.
After that, the film attempts to force sympathy out of the audience for Juanita as she speaks about how badly she wants to escape her current way of life, shifting towards much more dramatic territory. The film will jarringly abandon its comedic tendencies, and then bring them back at random points throughout the film that feel forced and mainly feel like jokes that were made for the sake of making jokes - with its lowest point being a horrid joke where Juanita constantly refers to Butte as “Butt,” something one may expect from an Adam Sandler or Rob Schneider movie, and not one that’s attempting to sell itself as some sort of realistic drama.
The film lacks any sort of real plot or character development, and once again, it’s confused. It’s not sure if it wants to do anything significant with its characters, or just stay stagnant and keep everyone in place. The film will constantly break the fourth wall and spell the characters’ emotions out to the audience, though it doesn’t look like anyone really wants to do anything of substance to change any of that. Sure, Juanita moves to a new city, but she remains the exact same person at the beginning of the movie, only stating she feels differently than she did at the beginning of the movie because the screenplay calls for it, and not through any sort of emotional journey or self-reflection. She changed cities, did nothing significant while there, and is now suddenly a changed person.
This goes in hand with the fact that the screenplay is outright terrible. The dialogue feels overly-simplistic, never once feeling like realistic dialogue that one would hear in an actual conversation between two human beings. The film is based on a book, titled Dancing on the Edge of the Roof, and while I have not read the book, what I do know is that books allow the reader to get into the characters’ minds through inner monologues, so that the conversations can be dedicated to exchanges that normal human beings would have one another.
This film, however, constantly overtly states how a character feels, as if the narration from Juanita herself wasn’t enough. No one really makes a clever observation or says anything that keeps the story moving forward. It’s a constant barrage of characters outright telling how they feel and then criticizing others for disagreeing with them. One such example of these sort of moments is this painfully drawn out banter where Juanita first enters Jess’ restaurant and repeatedly demands him to make her a fried egg because that’s what any other restaurant that serves breakfast would do.
On top of all this, Juanita herself is just not that interesting of a character. Alfre Woodard is a talented actress, and with the right script, can easily command a scene each time she’s on screen, with the best example being her villainous turn in Netflix’s Luke Cage. And she does try here, with her performance being one of the only standout features of the movie, semi-occasionally giving us a mildly entertaining moment here and there.
However, Juanita is a character who simply asks for our sympathy and nothing more. She explains at the beginning of the movie she’s fed up with her life, and wants us to feel bad for her because of it. She can be loud and persistent, which is really her only notable feature as it leads to a couple of the aforementioned entertaining moments, but that’s it. Her backstory isn’t intriguing, she never really says anything helpful to anyone, and she comes across as whiny, with everything feeling like it’s “my way or the highway” and that’s it. When the protagonist is someone with no outstanding features of their own, it’s really easy for the rest of the movie to suffer as a result.
Juanita is a movie that never knows where it’s going and asks its audience to come along in the hopes that they’ll make better sense of it than they can. The movie one minute asks for a pity party then will sporadically inject a horribly stale joke as a forced attempt to show it’s not all sad. Along the way, the audience is subjected to cringe-worthy dialogue, unlikable characters, and a journey that has no real purpose. Juanita is a magical mystery tour with none of the magic involved.
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