Wish I Was Here (2014)

Zach Braff returns to the director's chair with a semi-autobiographical meditation on a 35-year-old man who cannot quite locate his purpose. The cast is white to an almost architectural degree, with Donald Faison drifting through a supporting role as a reminder that someone, somewhere, considered the question of diversity for perhaps a moment. The identity concerns here are religious and familial instead: an Orthodox Jewish day school, a dying father, a lapsed faith rediscovered through a kindly young rabbi. This is not a film chasing racial consciousness. It is a film chasing its own feelings, and it catches a few of them.

A feminist thread does surface, briefly, when Kate Hudson's Sarah endures a workplace harasser and is rewarded with a year of severance while he is shown the door. It is a satisfying beat and it belongs entirely to a man's movie, a subplot orbiting the gravity of Aidan Bloom. The financial anxieties are personal, not systemic. The crowdfunding controversy that shadowed this production was a matter of venture capital wearing a grassroots costume, and the screenplay treats money as household hardship instead of an indictment of anything larger. No climate concerns intrude. No body positivity. No neurodivergent characters. No historical revisionism, unless we count a grown man's nostalgia for his childhood Space-Knight fantasies.

The homeschooling stretch carries a soft sermon, all life lessons and self-discovery delivered at low volume. Aidan teaches his children about life his way and, in the process, learns something about himself. It is the gentlest possible form of preaching, the kind that never raises its voice and never quite makes a demand. The result is a film of modest cultural ambition, reaching for sincerity and landing somewhere near a shrug. Braff's heart is plainly in it. The classification, however, is what it is.