Kajillionaire (2020)
Directed by Miranda July
No — Kajillionaire is not especially woke, scoring 27 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Miranda July's third feature concerns a family of small-time swindlers in Los Angeles who have spent twenty-six years training their daughter, Old Dolio, to steal alongside them.
Consciousness Markers
The film culminates in a genuine same-sex romance between Old Dolio and Melanie, and it was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award, though the queerness is understated rather than a central thesis.
The cast includes Gina Rodriguez, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Patricia Belcher, and Kim Estes in supporting roles, giving the ensemble some diversity, though the leads are white and the film makes no comment on casting as a statement.
Written and directed by Miranda July and centered on a young woman escaping the emotional exploitation of her parents, the film carries a female-authored, female-focused perspective without an explicit feminist polemic.
The plot involves petty grifting against insurance companies and elderly clients, offering a faint anti-establishment undertone, but it is a character study rather than a critique of capitalism.
Old Dolio is depicted as emotionally stunted and socially awkward after a lifetime of isolation, which could be read as neurodivergent-coded, but the film never names or frames it as such.
Miranda July's film is a quirky, oblique character piece that shows rather than preaches, with almost no didactic messaging.
Despite a multiracial supporting cast, the film engages in no racial themes, commentary, or consciousness whatsoever.
There is no environmental or climate-related content in the film.
The film contains no body-positivity themes or messaging.
The film is a contemporary fictional story with no historical revisionism of any kind.
Why it received this score
Miranda July's third feature concerns a family of small-time swindlers in Los Angeles who have spent twenty-six years training their daughter, Old Dolio, to steal alongside them. She is the film's center and its wound, raised to be an accomplice instead of a child, and Evan Rachel Wood plays her as a woman who never learned the grammar of affection. That the film was written and directed by a woman, and that it takes a young woman's emotional starvation seriously, lends it a female perspective without a manifesto attached. The supporting cast is more varied than the leads, with Gina Rodriguez, Da'Vine Joy Randolph and Patricia Belcher on hand, though the film never pauses to make a point of it. Race is simply not on the menu. Neither is the planet, or the sins of industry.
Where the film does lean forward is the quiet romance between Old Dolio and Melanie, the stranger who joins the grift and proves better at it than anyone. Their connection arrives late and lands gently, a kiss in a store over refunded birthday presents, and it earned the film a GLAAD nomination. This is a love story handled with restraint, not a thesis. Old Dolio's flattened affect and social bafflement invite a neurodivergent reading, but July never supplies the label. The family's crimes are petty: insurance fraud, a blank check lifted from an elderly client, the casual fleecing of the trusting. A faint disdain for institutions runs underneath, though the film cares more about the people than the system.
What the film refuses to do is lecture. There is no sermon on the body, no reckoning with history, no environmental lament. July shows a broken family and a woman learning to want something, and trusts the audience to do the arithmetic. The result is strange and oblique, a character piece that would sooner unsettle than instruct. In an era of cinema that mistakes volume for conviction, this one keeps its voice down. The cultural awareness on display is genuine but modest, a matter of casting, authorship and a tender same-sex ending offered without a raised finger.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Two con artists have spent 26 years training their only daughter to swindle, scam and steal at every turn. During a desperate and hastily conceived heist, they charm a stranger into joining them, only to have their entire world turned upside down.
Questions about Kajillionaire
Is Kajillionaire woke?
No — Kajillionaire is not especially woke, scoring 27 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Based.
Does Kajillionaire have any woke elements?
3 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by LGBTQ+ Themes (55), Feminist Agenda (35) and Representation Casting (35). On LGBTQ+ Themes: The film culminates in a genuine same-sex romance between Old Dolio and Melanie, and it was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award, though the queerness is understated rather than a central thesis.
How does Kajillionaire compare to other 2020 movies?
It ranks #59 of the 227 films from 2020 we've scored; their average is 21. The wokest is One Night in Miami... (83).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.