Max Barbakow makes high-concept comedies and starts them after the clever part is over. Palm Springs (2020) is quick, funny and better company than most comedies. It is also one good film, and we are not yet sure how much of it is his.
Fi1m perspective
The first thing to notice about Palm Springs (2020) is what it skips. Nyles (Andy Samberg) has been living the same wedding day for longer than he can count when the film starts, and Barbakow and his writer Andy Siara do not make us sit through him learning the rules. Sarah (Cristin Milioti) learns them instead, and we watch him watch her. Anyone who has seen Groundhog Day knows the machine; the trick is to begin once it has already worn its man out.
Barbakow started in shorts and documentaries, and Palm Springs was his first feature with a story and actors in it. By his own account the idea began somewhere darker, as a bender in the desert that did not make much sense. What he and Siara kept from that is the exhaustion; what they added is a woman with her own reasons to be in the desert. When he talks about the film it is mostly method: keeping the idea small enough to afford, and working out with the cinematographer, Quyen Tran, what each repeated scene meant to the people in it before deciding where to put the camera. You can see that on screen. The same wedding, the same pool and the same bar keep coming round, and Matt Friedman's cutting lets them read differently each time because the two people standing in them have moved on.
It is quick and funny and better company than most comedies of its size, and its spine is Milioti's, not Samberg's. Which is why the last stretch annoyed us more than we expected. Having built the film on Sarah, it hands her story back to Nyles for the finish, and the time-loop physics, which had been sensibly kept out of sight, are brought out to be looked at and do not bear it.
The second film, Brothers (2024), is a crime comedy on the road with Josh Brolin and Peter Dinklage, and most critics found it less effective than the debut and its tone uneven. The two announced projects, a body-swap comedy and Epiphany, are the same shape: a big premise with people inside it. That is a reasonable way to spend a career, so long as the people keep winning.
The open question is how much of Palm Springs belongs to him. The smartest choice in it is in Siara's script and the best performance is Milioti's, and a director can be praised for hiring both without our knowing yet what he adds. We would happily see the next one, and we would like it to settle the question.
Biography
Max Barbakow is an American director and writer. He graduated from Yale University in 2011 and earned an MFA in directing from the AFI Conservatory in 2015. He also trained with Werner Herzog in Cuba.
Barbakow's narrative feature debut Palm Springs (2020), which he directed and co-wrote with Andy Siara, premiered at Sundance and was acquired by NEON and Hulu. His earlier work includes the 2013 documentary Mommy, I'm a Bastard!, his Yale thesis film about his adoption. He directed the 2024 film Brothers.
