POOLMAN -- Charming, Sun-Soaked LA Neo-Noir Makes No Sense

Review by Daniel Lima

The hazy, loose Los Angeles-set neo-noir has become its own distinct subgenre. Seminal films such as The Long Goodbye, The Big Lebowski, and Inherent Vice follow detectives who end up way over their heads, caught in a web of conspiracies and subterfuge that they unravel only by happenstance. Poolman, the directorial debut of actor Chris Pine, has the charm, the disconnected narrative, the performances, and the look of these films down pat. Paradoxically, however, it lacks the focus that makes the best of them so potent.
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Pine stars as — wouldn’t you know it — a poolman who lives and works at a roadside motel. After a routine visit to city hall, heckling local officials for not meeting the needs of their constituents, he is approached by a mysterious woman who asks for his help in uncovering a criminal plot involving some of the most powerful men in LA. Together with his closest friends, he attempts to expose the seedy underbelly of the highest echelon of the city… regardless of how utterly lost he actually is.

To give the film some credit, it is clear this is a labor of love. Pine is as charming as he has ever been, and it’s clear he has great empathy for the now-familiar archetype of the principled yet underachieving lout, committed to the cause of righteousness even if he is neither the most competent nor exemplary model of a do-gooder. The rest of the ensemble relishes their role, with DaWanda Wise and Stephen Toblowsky especially being the clear standouts. Fostering a sense of community goes a long way in grounding a film like this, and the distinct characters that populate this world certainly help with that.

​For what it’s worth, it doesn’t have the amateurish, slapdash feel that many an actor’s vanity project has either. Produced by filmmaker Patty Jenkins and the experienced Stacey Sher, shot on celluloid by Jenkins’ frequent cinematographer, and having intricate sets and costumes that are varied and revealing, the care that went into creating this world is right on the screen. In Poolman, Los Angeles is exactly the vibrant, offbeat, singular place that its title character would take such interest in defending.

It is unfortunate, then, that the movie makes absolutely no sense.

An ephemeral and esoteric narrative, or at least a prohibitively convoluted one, is part and parcel of this brand of sun-soaked noir. That said, they still have to maintain a perspective, impart some kind of artistic thesis, or, at the very least, establish stakes. At some point, there needs to be a sense of exactly how out of their depth the protagonist is, how far-reaching the power of their foes is, and how integral their nefarious schemes are to the society they corrupt.

That moment of elucidation never arrives here. Multiple viewings of Pine’s appeals to the city council do nothing to help clear up what exactly has him so aggrieved in the first place. As he investigates further, the names of people and places are rattled off so quickly, with no faces to attach them to, that it becomes impossible to keep track of who is who and what is what. When these unseen figures do finally show up, they are shuffled into and out of the narrative so quickly that it’s hard to make sense of their significance. All this means that what is actually happening is unfathomable long before the mystery gets underway. 

This means that this film lives and dies on how much the audience can enjoy hanging out with these characters. The problem there is that, while the performances are solid and the character’s personalities are well-defined, they don’t have good material to work with. For all the absurd humor and outsized acting, nothing here is particularly funny. For all the technical craftsmanship on display, both the flow of the story and the rhythm of individual scenes feel off, with too much dead air in both. A sharper script would have benefitted all the best elements of the movie greatly; without that, there’s nothing to tie it together into a cohesive whole.

Yet it’s hard to be too hard on Poolman. At a time when even smaller films feel like they are playing things safe, attempting to meet audience expectations rather than set them, it is nice to see someone use their star power to push something so shaggy and odd to the finish line.

Poolman is now playing in theaters

​Rating: 3/5​