Imagine That (2009)

Imagine That arrives from 2009, a year when a family comedy could still be a family comedy and nothing more. Eddie Murphy plays Evan Danielson, a securities man whose career is circling the drain until his daughter Olivia, played by Yara Shahidi, reveals that her imaginary friends can predict the market. The principal cast is largely Black, and the film never once clears its throat about it. No character announces the significance of the arrangement. It simply is. In the taxonomy of the current decade this registers as a faint pulse and nothing more, and the picture earns what credit it has from the absence of self-congratulation.

The workplace material is where the film shows its age in the other direction. Thomas Haden Church's rival executive spouts Native American pastiche, and the company chants along. The joke is broad and coarse, landing somewhere between caricature and embarrassment. A modern production would either cut it or append a lecture. This one lets it sit there, unloved and unexamined. The moral is that a father should attend his daughter's concert instead of his presentation. Capitalism is not indicted. It is rewarded. Evan skips the meeting and gets the promotion anyway, which is the most honest thing in the screenplay.

The daughter's fantasy life is whimsy, not diagnosis, and the film makes no attempt to frame her imagination as anything but imagination. There is no environmental sermon. No body-positive subplot, no historical revision, no queer text, nothing that a contemporary studio would feel obliged to braid into the running time. The remainder is a gentle, mildly preachy fable about presence and parenthood, delivered with the softest possible hand. A critic could call it harmless. A sommelier of such vintages would call it a thin, inoffensive table wine, poured without ceremony and forgotten by dessert.