If director Jason Reitman wants you to take anything away
from his new film Men, Women and Children, it’s the knowledge that the
internet is a very bad thing, I mean a REALLY bad thing, an awful, irredeemable
BAD THING! This Pandora’s Box of the 21st century is responsible for
all of our societal ills and if I didn’t know better, it’s leading us towards
the end of civilization, as we know it.Â
Did I mention it was bad?
Sorry to be so overly dramatic but this is the approach
Reitman takes throughout the film, stating the obvious and then restating it
again and again in an increasingly obvious manner. I don’t mean to make light of this issue
either as there’s no question that the Internet Revolution given birth to a
form of communication that can be ill-used in a seemingly anonymous manner on a
global scale. While there’s no way to tell, I’d be willing to bet that more
good than bad has come from this development but as with so many things, those
that do harm get far more attention than those that don’t.
There’s little good about it in Men as the internet proves
to be a portal to sexual dysfunction and self-abuse, infidelity, illegal
activities, the breakdown of communication between intimates and…well I could
go on and on but I don’t need to as Reitman does it for me. In adapting the
novel by Chad Kultgen, the director takes a multi-narrative approach in which
the film’s various plot strands ultimately dovetail into one another. Adam Sandler and Rosemary DeWitt star as Don
and Helen Truby, a married couple that’s lost that loving feeling, so much so
that he has turned to the world wide web in order to solicit prostitutes while
she’s joined an on-line dating service fashioned to enable folks to have
affairs. Meanwhile, their son Chris
(Travis Tope) has looked at so much on-line porn that he’s unable to get
aroused in a normal way, which comes as a disappointment to his sexy
cheerleader friend Hannah (Olivia Crocicchia) when they start to get busy one
night and he can’t perform. The young
woman has become sexualized at an early age thanks to her mother (Judy Greer)
who takes cheesecake pictures and sells them on-line. This is one of the things high school
counselor Patricia (Jennifer Garner) fears, so much so that she monitors and
censors everything her daughter Brandy (Kaitlyn Dever) texts, tweets or
emails. This proves to be a major
hindrance to her developing relationship with Tim (Ansel Elgort), the only
genuine person she knows at high school.
There are many moving parts at play here and if Reitman does
anything right it’s that he ably juggles the various plotlines. While multi-strand narratives of this sort
are a bit gimmicky by their very nature here the stories come together
naturally, a logical outcome of the events in the narrative not an occurrence
dictated simply by the film’s structure.Â
Yet, what proves to be so maddening about the movie is
Reitman’s ham-fisted approach to the material as he hammers home the film’s
theme (for those with short memories, see above) again and again with an air of
pretention that, because it longs to be profound about the obvious, proves
insulting to the audience and makes the film seem a bit silly. This is a bit of a surprise coming from the
director as he’s proven to have a deft touch with sensitive material as seen in Up in the Air and Young Adult.
To be sure, Men, Women and Children contains valid
concerns. Is it possible to be truly
intimate in an era in which on-line chatting and phone-driven dialogues have
taken the place of meaningful conversation?Â
And with the ease with which on can re-invent themselves and hide within
an on-line community, living a dual life and hiding your true nature from your
partner has become easier than ever. The
temptation to do so has never been greater and I’d be willing to bet more
people have sought refuge her than they’d care to admit. The effective of these behaviors is fodder
worth examining albeit one a bit less crowded and more focused than Men.
This article appears in Oct 16-22, 2014.
