Earlier this year in this publication, I forgave Jason Reitman for Labor Day, because every great director delivers a clunker now and then. But after viewing his latest, Men, Women and Children, it seems evident that his Midas touch has turned to lead.
Unlike Labor Day, however, Men, Women and Children is a movie of hulking ambition, an attempt to comprehend the 21st-century zeitgeist that stretches all the way to the cosmos. In the opening image, the satellite Voyager caresses the wings of Saturn to a score of Woody Allenish jazz music, while narration from Emma Thompson discuss the gold-plated recordings it houses, a survey of American culture curated by Carl Sagan.
What does this planetary framing device have to do with the terrestrial ensemble dramedy we’re about to see? Not much, really, despite the tangential gasping and groping for significance the scenes assume later on. Reitman is not Terrence Malick; he tells more than he shows, and he never misses an opportunity for pretentious self-importance, the kind of which Sagan would have nothing to do with.
Here on Earth, a cluster of Texas families are in trouble, all of it exacerbated by technology: Don and Rachel Truby (Adam Sandler and Rosemarie DeWitt) escape their sexless marriage by drifting into the arms of others, through an online escort service and a profile on Ashley Madison, respectively; their 15-year-old son’s (Travis Tope) addiction to ever-more-deviant pornography has crushed any realistic expectations for sex.
Joan Clint (Judy Greer), a mother and onetime aspiring actress, lives pathetically and vicariously through her comely daughter (Olivia Crocicchia), turning her daughter’s promotional website into a profit-making venture for lecherous clients. Patricia Beltmeyer (Jennifer Garner) is on the opposite end of the parental spectrum, monitoring her daughter’s every online interaction like she was Big Brother with NSA clearance.
Kent Mooney (Dean Norris) is a middle-aged father whose wife recently abandoned him and his son for a younger model in California, and his world is rocked when his boy (Ansel Elgort), a star football player, leaves the team after he watches Carl Sagan’s (there he is again) “Pale Blue Dot” video on YouTube and discovers his own cosmic insignificance. Finally, Allison Doss (Elena Kampouris) is a high schooler with an eating disorder enabled, like everything else in the film, by the World Wide Web.
Based on a novel of the same name by Chad Kultgen, the movie’s formula is familiar and ’90s-chic: the rot at the core of the American suburban family. Men, Women & Children is Happiness and American Beauty plus the Internet — an exposé of moral drift and disconnection made all too easier by instant clickability. The arc, for most of these characters, is one of shame toward enlightenment: It’s common for Reitman to linger on their faces for an extra beat before they click on something they’ll regret later, analyzing the contours of self-disgust those faces contain.
It’s not a worthless movie by any means; we need a film that speaks to the modern human condition, depicting us as a sea of self-involved zombies in throng to our portable devices. And the acting is solid across the board, especially from Greer, who masters her character’s shameless attempts to relive her youth; and from Sandler, who has a long, melancholy face fit for these quiet-desperation roles.
But I felt very little as this procession of ignominy continued its march into the abyss, and that’s because of the movie’s utter transparence, its schematic blueprint of pain. It’s calculated to a T, designed foremost as a cautionary tale, an after-school special, a sermon.
Indeed, Men, Women and Children is preachier than a megachurch keynote, a secular harangue that too-often stretches credulity to make its grandiose points. It fundamentally undermines its seriousness in its final image of empty symbolism, a shot of stupefying naïveté masquerading as a profound societal corrective: Unplug, and your problems vanish. It almost makes me want to, finally, open up a Twitter account.
MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN. Director: Jason Reitman; Cast: Rosemarie DeWitt, Jennifer Garner, Judy Greer, Dean Norris, Adam Sandler, Ansel Elgort, Kaitlyn Dever, Dennis Haysbert, J.K. Simmons; Distributor: Paramount; Rating: R; Opens: Friday at most area theaters