It’s easy to see Jason Reitman’s ambition for Men, Women & Children to be a big
statement about How We Live Now. The film is a Very Serious ensemble drama
about a cross-section of characters living intertwined melodramas a la Crash or Babel. In this case they’re a bunch of high schoolers and their
parents in suburban Texas – though really a vague Modern Anytown, USA – who
live disconnected from their feelings and each other. We see lives of quiet
desperation mediated by screens showing digital spaces that alternately soothe
and exacerbate their problems. Fair enough, but despite fitfully operating as
effective drama, it’s clearly a movie built thesis statement backwards into
character and incident, frozen by its own sense of importance. Worse, there’s
not much to its thesis, which is as muddled as it is trite, developing its
emptiness with a heavy hand.
I suppose muddled moralizing speaks, even accidentally, to
our societal ambivalence towards technology. It’d be an interesting idea around
which to build a drama, but Reitman, adapting with Erin Cressida Wilson a novel
by Chad Kultgen, creates a series of events that reflect bland reprimand,
concerned handwringing, or vacuous same-as-it-ever-was resignation, sometimes
all at once. Caught halfway between scolding and shrugging, it has a view of
the Internet that feels so outdated and incomplete I almost expected to hear a
modem dial up on the soundtrack. Plot threads involve infidelities, romances,
repression, self-harm, painful yearning, and a variety of questionable
decisions. Each is filtered through and aided by the Internet. That’s what
gives it a patina of timeliness around which it spins rather empty, cliché
stories saved only fitfully by strong acting across the board.
The best plotline, perhaps because it draws best on the small character work Reitman did well in better movies like Juno and Young Adult, involves two high school kids dealing with
emotional issues. She (Kaitlyn Dever, of Short
Term 12 and ABC’s Last Man Standing)
is a loner, bookish, sweet, and under the surveillance of a technophobe mother
(Jennifer Garner). He (Ansel Elgort, of The
Fault in Our Stars) is a football player who quit the team when his mom left
the family, leaving his dad (Dean Norris) inattentive to his son’s depression.
The kids forge a connection that feels genuine, and twists around the tech in a
reasonably convincing way. Other stories aren’t as successful. A bored married
couple (Rosemarie DeWitt and Adam Sandler) each secretly turn to the web to find
affairs, a plotline that’s a weird blend of shame and forgiveness and, unfortunately,
does not turn into a “Piña Colada Song” situation. Their son (Travis Tope)
is addicted to porn. His real-life crush is a fame-hungry cheerleader (Olivia
Crocicchia) whose mother (Judy Greer) lets her start a modeling website.
Meanwhile, a fellow cheerleader (Elena Kampouris) suffers from body image
problems brought about by bullying and egged on by online friends.
With a sprawling Message Movie format, there is unevenness
built into the structure. Individual stories or scenes work well, but the big
picture is a muddle of good intentions, flawed observations, and bad decisions.
It’s all tied together with arch narration (by Emma Thompson, speaking in a
voice not too far from her Stranger Than
Fiction storyteller) that prattles on against the backdrop of space,
speaking about Carl Sagan as NASA hardware floats by. Then she’ll dip down with
an edit into quotidian explanations about character thoughts and actions,
drolly telling us details we can plainly see before us. Reitman’s repetitive screenplay
includes heavy-handed, awkwardly inserted, digressions reflecting on 9/11 and
“my, how much the world has changed.” Yes. And? It’s a dash of self-serious
muttering.
The film’s worst tendencies are reflected in Garner’s
character, who has a keystroke logger on her daughter’s devices and hosts
fearmongering info sessions for fellow parents. She starts as a humorless
paranoid scold who means well. Over the course of her storyline, she goes from
spying on everything her daughter does to stopping cold turkey. In the world of
this movie, it’s all or nothing, ignoring both the very real benefits of
parental oversight and the virtues of trust and flexibility. It’s too
uncomfortable lingering in grey areas, too eager to wrap up conflicts. So much
so that for all its overt exploring of the screen-saturated culture’s impact on
individuals – I liked a recurring image of crowds, everyone looking at screens,
their apps hovering translucently above them like a cloud of distraction – the
worst events any characters go through happen entirely (or almost entirely) offline.
The movie seems to want a Big Statement, but isn’t sure
what to say. In some ways it’s progressive, acknowledging that sometimes lonely,
socially isolated people can find solace online that can improve their real
world well being. And it’s certainly true that one can get lost in the muck of
the web’s worst tendencies. Our world is complex. But every story in this movie that resolves wraps up neatly with
a pat Internet-good-for-this, Internet-bad-for-that judgment. Other storylines
drop off without resolution, maybe for the best, since I don’t think the
filmmakers, though they bring the subjects up, had meaningful discussion of
body image, sexual fantasies, or sex work in them. What’s here is an attempt to
pass off well-intentioned fumbling in the shallow end as an important deep
dive.
No comments:
Post a Comment