Men, Women & Children
Directed by: Jason Reitman
Written by: Jason Reitman - Co-writer: Erin Cressida Wilson - Based on the novel by Chad Kultgen
Starring: Ansel Elgort, Adam Sandler, Jennifer Garner, Emma Thompson, Judy Greer, Kaitlyn Dever, Dean Norris, Dennis Haysbert, Rosemarie DeWitt, J.K. Simmons, Elena Kampouris, Olivia Crocicchia, David Denman, Phil LaMarr, Will Peltz, Travis Tope
Comedy/Drama - 119 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 1 Oct 2014
Written by: Jason Reitman - Co-writer: Erin Cressida Wilson - Based on the novel by Chad Kultgen
Starring: Ansel Elgort, Adam Sandler, Jennifer Garner, Emma Thompson, Judy Greer, Kaitlyn Dever, Dean Norris, Dennis Haysbert, Rosemarie DeWitt, J.K. Simmons, Elena Kampouris, Olivia Crocicchia, David Denman, Phil LaMarr, Will Peltz, Travis Tope
Comedy/Drama - 119 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 1 Oct 2014
If you let it, the Internet has the power to amplify any and all of your problems and here and now issues. The bored married couple stumbles upon Ashley Madison and escort services respectively. The anorexic’s Thin2Win support group urges her to just smell the shepherd’s pie while eating celery. A depressed teenager wondering what it all means finds solace in logging a thousand hours playing Guild Wars attempting to disconnect from what he refers to as ‘RL’ – real life. Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children features a large, ensemble cast of high school teenagers and their parents attempting to navigate uncharted waters of how new technology and social media impacts their lives. The film is not a warning to parents or a morality tale with a message; it is domestic drama showcasing normal folks and their responses to and interactions with emerging digital era.
Men, Women & Children reminds me of 2013’s Disconnect, but with much less of an after school special vibe. Disconnect’s message was more cautionary displaying a kid’s life being destroyed by a selfie. Reitman also includes extreme examples to get his point across but they are still believable, however much implausible. Patricia (Jennifer Garner, 2014's Draft Day) logs every single one of her daughter’s keystrokes and spends hours one night each week combing through her chat logs and Facebook friends deleting them at will. She monitors her daughter’s bicycle commute home from school by watching the GPS tracker on her phone. To Patricia, the Internet is a tentacled, lurking sexual predator that will tear her little angel apart limb from limb. Joan (Judy Greer, 2014's Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) exploits her more than willing daughter’s teenaged body on a scantily clad website with fingers crossed a Hollywood reality show will discover her.
Men, Women & Children reminds me of 2013’s Disconnect, but with much less of an after school special vibe. Disconnect’s message was more cautionary displaying a kid’s life being destroyed by a selfie. Reitman also includes extreme examples to get his point across but they are still believable, however much implausible. Patricia (Jennifer Garner, 2014's Draft Day) logs every single one of her daughter’s keystrokes and spends hours one night each week combing through her chat logs and Facebook friends deleting them at will. She monitors her daughter’s bicycle commute home from school by watching the GPS tracker on her phone. To Patricia, the Internet is a tentacled, lurking sexual predator that will tear her little angel apart limb from limb. Joan (Judy Greer, 2014's Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) exploits her more than willing daughter’s teenaged body on a scantily clad website with fingers crossed a Hollywood reality show will discover her.
Each of the six or seven storylines is loosely linked with overlapping characters and hop around every five minutes or so; the pacing and cyclic motion of the action borders on soap opera. To kick off the film and intermittently checking back in is the omniscient narrator voiced by Emma Thompson (2013's Saving Mr. Banks). She tells us what the characters are thinking at the exact moment we are looking at them and hangs out on the Voyager I satellite as it glides into deep space out of the solar system. The Voyager I is Reitman’s nexus which is supposed to unite all of the disparate souls together in one time capsule.
Men, Women & Children turns metaphysical a few times kicking around Carl Sagan’s notion that we are all confined on a pale blue dot floating around in the mind-boggling nothingness of empty space. Tim (Ansel Elgort, 2014's The Fault in Our Stars) is a distraught 15-year-old who concludes nothing we do matters at all because in the astronomical level of detail, humans do not matter. Brandy (Kaitlyn Dever, 2011's J. Edgar), a fellow sophomore, forms an attachment to Tim and considers human connection the antidote to the ‘we are alone in the middle of nowhere’ feeling.
Not every storyline is as interesting as Tim and Brandy’s. Anorexic cheerleader Allison (Elena Kampouris, 2013's Labor Day) is infatuated with a meathead football player who has nothing but casual insults to offer her. Allison’s idea is to starve herself so she will be more attractive. Her storyline does seep over the line into eye-rolling teenage melodrama but we get pulled back in watching Adam Sandler (2014's Blended) and Rosemarie DeWitt (2011's Your Sister's Sister) realize they have nothing to say to one another and start to look in various adulterous locales to find what they feel is absent from their current partner. I look forward to Sandler’s dramatic roles. His performances in Punch-Drunk Love (2002) and Reign Over Me (2007) are naturally more relatable and palatable than any Jack and Jill (2011) or That’s My Boy (2012) comedic farce which Sandler considers his natural habitat.
2014 seems a bit late to film alarmist episodes concerning online video games and over-dosing on porn just as 2013’s The Internship was almost a full decade late in lampooning Google Silicon Valley culture. Jason Reitman slides another foot away from his early bravo-worthy films Thank You For Smoking (2005), Juno (2007), Up in the Air (2009), and Young Adult (2011). 2013’s Labor Day and now Men, Women & Children are anomalies to his biting, socially sarcastic start. Future Reitman analysts will have his early period to begin their dissections and then will move on to his films which feel aimed at his neighborhood Rotary Club, which feels like the only demographic Reitman will end up scaring here.
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