Bubble Boy Review

Eighty-four minutes is not long, and this still feels padded out. The setup has a boy raised in a sterile plastic room by a mother who tells him the outside world is full of sin, so he builds a portable bubble and crosses the country to stop the girl next door from marrying someone else. There is a real film inside that premise.

What Blair Hayes made instead is a string of roadside sketches: a cult that worships Gil the ice cream man, a chain gang, Fabio, a Hindu family played entirely for accent jokes, a mud wrestling troupe. The gags are not built toward, they are simply placed. Gyllenhaal commits completely, which is the only honest work on screen, playing Jimmy's sincerity straight and taking the physical humiliation without once winking at the camera, and Marley Shelton gives Chloe more warmth than the script asks of her.

Everything else is flat. The lighting is television bright, the bubble is rendered without any of the visual invention the idea invites, and Swoosie Kurtz plays the same shrieking joke on a loop for an hour. The ending asks for a feeling that every preceding scene has disqualified the film from receiving.