There is no more prized possession in New York City on a sweltering summer day than a working air conditioning unit. Simon Hacker’s father-daughter comedy “Notice to Quit” understands this well, which is why the real estate broker it follows on this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day keeps coming back to the bounteous promises an AC unit can offer. Taking place in all five boroughs of the city, Hacker’s frenzied film mirrors his mentors, the Safdie brothers, but ultimately falters by doing the very thing that AC unit would help ease: It lets us see it sweat.
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Andy Singer (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” actor Michael Zegen) is at his wits’ end. His dreams of being an actor have resulted in nothing more than a toothpaste ad campaign that gets him sort of recognized by folks all over the city. His job as a real estate broker finds him showing increasingly dire prospects to renters who immediately flee his presence. And his side hustle as a purveyor of working appliances from said units to a shady reseller is proving ever harder with those inadmissible apartments his boss keeps saddling him with. Oh, and he’s currently being evicted for being late on his rent — all on the day his estranged 10-year-old daughter decides to show up unannounced to let him know she and her mother are moving to Orlando.
In an on-the-nose touch, Andy has also spilled coffee on his shirt at the very start of his day — a detail that drives the point a little bit too hard, even as it sets up the way “Notice to Quit” will continually ask us to proffer its sad sack of an estranged dad a modicum of sympathy his actions may not wholly deserve. Which is to say: Andy’s day spent hauling his precocious young daughter Anna (a wide-eyed Kasey Bella Suarez) all over the city becomes a sweat-fueled exercise in begrudging atonement, if not any significant kind of growth.
Such a premise — a father and his daughter spend a day unwittingly bonding as he tries to get his life together, perhaps in spite of himself and his many ill-fated decisions — could be unbearably twee, were we not immersed in the wheeling and dealing world of two-bit Realtors, or a city this oppressive. Thanks to Mika Altskan’s discomfitingly intimate handheld cinematography, “Notice to Quit” feels designed to make you squeamish about every surface in New York, from subway chairs to sidewalk benches. Still, there is the sense that Andy and Anna’s day together is needlessly tidy even amid the muck they constantly come up against. This is a city that is and does you dirty, yet there’s an oddly sanitized vision of its central character the film cannot escape.
The broker as a figure feels tailor-made to stand in for the most arcane and enraging ways in which people are swindled in New York City on any given day. “Putting gel in your hair and lying to people doesn’t count as work,” Andy’s ex-wife cracks. “I use mousse,” Andy volleys back, in one of Zegen’s signature winking self-deprecating gestures that are meant to signal how aware Andy is about the many scams and schemes that have thus far kept him afloat.
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Yet Hacker and Zegen can never quite commit to seeing Andy in such a light. If only he’d be dealt a better hand he’d be a better person — a better father, in fact. His agency at every turn is outright excused. Even when his daughter calls him out on using a cockroach to get out of paying a diner bill (and likely endangering the job of the cook at that establishment), Andy brushes it off with requisite indifference: “That was an opportunity, not a crime.”
The film makes clear it knows Andy’s flailing is part of his now-failing shtick. But that doesn’t make 90 minutes spent hoping he’ll become a more caring father and a more honest broker (arguably an oxymoron) any easier. It would help if Zegen and Suarez had more crackling chemistry. Instead, their stilted onscreen camaraderie does the film no favors, especially as Andy and Anna gradually begin to get on better.
With a too-neat premise rubbing up against a clearly lived-in sense of place, “Notice to Quit” feels like an amiable sitcom pilot set in the New York City of the Safdie brothers (where time is of the essence if Andy wants to keep all of his fingers!). Yet in (mostly) forgoing the maudlin hijinks of the former and the anxiety-inducing stunts of the latter, Hacker’s film never quite finds its groove and ultimately overstays its welcome even with its brisk runtime and fleet-footed plotting.
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