Tech-ed Off: MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN

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 Caught halfway between scolding and shrugging, it has a view of the Internet that feels so outdated and incomplete I almost expected to hear a modem dial up on the soundtrack.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.

Outsiders: TERRI

You’d think a small independent comedy about a quirky outcast high school boy would have nothing new to say and would, at best, be a reasonably watchable riff on the expected character arcs that have been with us since at least the height of Sundance’s popularity. But then along comes Azazel Jacobs’s Terri, which confounds and amuses precisely because it squirms around every trap its concept would seem to have set.

Terri (Jacob Wysocki) is a sullen heavyset teenager who lives in a small house in the middle of the woods with his uncle (Creed Bratton). You can tell from the home’s eccentric décor that his uncle was once a man with a rich and diverse intellectual life filled with many worthwhile hobbies and pursuits. Now, though, he’s sinking into dementia, alternating good days and bad days. Terri has his bad days too. He feels ignored at school, a small presence in a large frame.

Suddenly Terri makes a change, deciding to wear pajamas when he goes to school, on the days he decides to go to school, that is. This concerns the principal (John C. Reilly) who calls him into his office to inquire about Terri’s mental state. The two of them strike up an uneasy relationship – friendship isn’t quite the right word – as the principal decides that they should meet at least once a week. This development doesn’t turn into an awkward buddy comedy. Instead Jacobs and co-writer Patrick Dewitt allow these characters to remain resolutely separate, fumbling in their own ways towards a connection with a kindred spirit. There’s no chance for easy, cheap sentimentality or standard high-school-mentor uplift. Someone in a position of authority is not automatically imbued with the keys to emotional success. Reilly plays a man completely uncomfortable with himself, but all-too comfortable with yelling at a problem student to “Sit down! In a chair!”

During his time waiting outside the office, Terri meets other students, outcasts of one sort of another. One kid (Bridger Zadina), a small, skinny late-bloomer sits perpetually hunched, the better to pull out strands of his own hair. Later, he’ll show up unannounced at Terri’s house, so eager to grasp on to tenuous potential for friendship. Another, a pretty blonde (Olivia Crocicchia), was caught with her lab partner (Justin Prentice) in a vaguely consensual, wholly inappropriate for school, anatomy experiment in the middle of home ec. Terri defends her to the principal, trying to save her from suspension. There’s the underlying feeling of an unrequited crush to Terri’s actions, but at first he’s almost too embarrassed to admit it to himself.

I sat watching these characters shuffle towards some sense of connection, some sense of actualization, and realized that I had no idea where the next scene would take them. There’s a simmering feeling of realism to the drama and the comedy, an electric feeling of watching lives unfolding. The production design is remarkably drab, specificity of the highest sort. A cluttered house, a run-down high school, these are places that feel lived in, appropriately worn. The characters themselves, and the actions they take, don't feel driven by easily understandable movie emotions or the needs of the script. There’s an almost painful sense that these characters are real. I could identify with their feelings on an almost wounding level. Here are people who are all, in their own unique ways, desperately lonely. I could hardly stand to see them hurt.

So precisely acted and convincingly written, the film moves forward with the compelling, stimulating sensation of unpredictability. Some sequences had me breathlessly anticipating the next line, the next gesture. Individual moments are so deeply felt, so generously heartfelt, that I couldn’t help but be amazed. It also feels so painfully accurate, especially at its most acutely awkward, when the characters are most suffering from raw adolescent alienation that it can be incredibly difficult to watch. I suppose it’s inevitable in some ways for a film that feels so real to end with a sense of incompletion.  Could real life ever be wrapped up as neatly and completely as an impeccably structured film? Of course not, and that this movie tries to reach some kind of satisfyingly conclusion is ultimately it’s biggest misstep in a final shot that’s too simple and small to be definitive. It has the feel and form of a conclusion but lacks the content of one. I hardly cared. It is, after all, just one shot, and the way there is so excruciatingly complicated.