Review: Crystal Fairy
More or less stuck in Chile and waiting for funding to come through for another project, director Sebastian Silva and Michael Cera made like overachievers and filmed Crystal Fairy in the meantime. The result unsurprisingly has the distinct tone of a micro-budget movie shot on the fly, incorporating whatever elements must have appeared during production. The first act seems to promise 70 more minutes of rambling episodes, at the overbearing whim of a director toying with an insufferable protagonist.
It’s a bit of a shock, then, when Crystal Fairy turns out to be really good. Jamie, an expat played by Michael Cera as a walking mushroom cloud of anxiety and id, drunkenly invites an eccentric American woman named Crystal Fairy (Gaby Hoffman, free-spirited and unflappable) to join him and his friends on a quest north to ingest a hallucinogenic cactus on the beach. She gamely takes him up on the invitation, but, when sober, Jamie has only impatience and condescension in store for the group’s hippie newcomer. Thankfully, their road trip is polyvalent, affording him ample opportunity for interpersonal redemption in altered states.
Prior to Crystal’s introduction into the main plot, Cera’s Jamie is presented as annoying but, for better or worse, our protagonist, should we choose to accept him. But playing off of Hoffman’s gentleness, Jamie is pure unchecked and rampaging privilege, recalling his cameo in This Is the End. What’s apparently Cera’s new go-to type is a natural progression from his earlier brand of charm and ineffectual hypersensitivity, now gone horribly wrong. He makes fun of Crystal’s body hair; she brushes it off with grace. As totally antithetical personalities, the two are perfect dramatic complements, each aiding in the other’s growth. But make no mistake: Crystal is no manic pixie dream girl, and she does not save him with a steady prescription of cute quirks. Rather, she just does her best not to let him get her down, and he learns to view her as an actual human being.
Jamie’s roommate, Champa, and Champa’s two appealing brothers fill out the honking Chevy Suburban that cuts through the Chilean desert, and provide a much-needed element of easy-going likability. Silva’s real-life siblings play the three brothers, who are part sounding board for the Americans and their extremes, part audience surrogate. They’re along for the ride, and much like the movie in which they exist, perfectly amiable despite their fellow travelers’ ample idiosyncrasies.
