“Heaven becomes predictable, doesn’t it?” Paul (Dylan Baker) says to Toby (Steve Little) in “Riptides,” looking over the edge of a beachside mansion on the coast of Mexico. He isn’t referring to a breathtaking sunset, but rather the life that Toby has described of spending his days bodyboarding and playing bongos when he can in between his professional obligation of managing homes to be leased out to rich folks like Paul, a self-help author who has come for a little R & R before what’s set to be a rigorous book tour. Paul may tell others how to live their best lives, but he looks miserable as he’s led around by his daughter Michelle (Bojana Novakovic), who isn’t happy either with the arrangement that she’s her father’s business manager when she’s rather just be his daughter, yet she dutifully insists on pulling him aside to make Instagram posts to promote the upcoming tour on this vacation and spending much of her own time in paradise double checking their travel plans in Phoenix.
Still, “Riptides” is a happy occasion when it marks the welcome return to the director’s chair for Alex Karpovsky, a contemporary of Andrew Bujalski, Lena Dunham and Joe Swanberg who appeared as if he was well on his way to their auteur status until starring in their films led to steady acting career. Nearly 15 years after delivering the wildly different double feature of “Rubberneck” and “Red Flag,” the filmmaker’s first feature that he hasn’t had to star in himself is a slicker production than the scrappy indies he first made a name with, making full use of its festive setting in Sayulita, said in the film to only be days away from the big Dia de los Muertos celebration. However, while it may have been less stressful to only have responsibilities in back of the camera rather than in front of it, his interest in neurotic characters hasn’t abated as he considers influencer culture, both in a social media sense when keeping up appearances is top of mind for Michelle, but also when there’s an entire economy built around living your best life as Paul promotes, yet the truth is far from the image he projects in his best sellers.
Unfortunately, that isn’t evident to a rube like Toby, who can’t help but run a Google search on the newest guest at one of the houses he manages and begins to hear Paul preaching positivity in interviews on YouTube, though advice to be more daring and ambitious would seem to actually not be a good idea when he’s already got it made, enjoying an enviable work/life balance he’d be crazy to upend. Yet Paul’s platitudes can’t help but cut deep — in one of the film’s nice stylistic touches, they become particularly resonant when Toby puts in his AirPods to listen to his audiobook – and soon he is hatching plans to create a line of bodyboards with a hole placed around the crotch region so the friction doesn’t bother the user as it often has him. The idea isn’t a good one, but there’s worse in store for Toby should he continue to heed Paul’s advice as scenes between the author and his daughter reveal that as he publicly espouses how sobriety changed his life, he’s pouring vodka into his smoothies and there’s little she can do to control him as he falls off the wagon. This can’t end well and the more Michelle is asked to cover up an increasingly dire situation, the more she resents the hypocrisy of it, though she and her brother Wilson (Paul Reynolds), who consults from afar, don’t want to jeopardize the $12 million in royalties Paul can be expected to bring in annually. That leaves her in a particularly awkward situation with her host, who has fully fallen for Paul’s act and revealing the truth to him could lead to her own downfall.
While it’s a premise that can seem as if it’s stretched slightly thin over a generally breezy hour-and-a-half runtime, “Riptides” fittingly has more on its mind than the dumb comedy it looks like on the surface as presentations of perfection not only lead to anxieties for average folks who think they could do better but actively set into motion changes that will set them back even further. Besides getting Karpovsky back behind the camera for one of the nerve-racking situations he thrives in depicting, it’s always nice to see Little, still best known as Kenny Powers’ sidekick in “Eastbound and Down,” go for broke in a lead role and Novakovic, equally underestimated as both a dramatic actor from “Burning Man” and a comedienne, really gives the film a strong emotional core as the conflicted Michelle, skeptical of having the power to project authority when she can’t get any satisfaction from it. Although Toby starts parroting Paul’s words of wisdom that “you can have either have happiness or meaning, but you can’t have both,” “Riptides,” as it does throughout, suggests that line of thinking is wrong when it provides plenty of both.
“Riptides” does not yet have U.S. distribution.