Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children is an art film disguising itself as a star-driven dark comedy. It is meticulously paced but episodic, built on its characters but highly impersonal. And while it fails to reach the heights of the filmmaker’s prior works, it is unapologetically a Jason Reitman picture.
The film opens with a peculiar sequence of shots of the Voyager
1 spacecrafts buzzing past planets on its way out of our solar system. The
rings of Saturn, Jupiter’s Giant Red Spot feature in the series, with narration
providing information about Voyager’s voyage. The space probe is equipped with
a record player designed to give potential extraterrestrial life its first
glimpse at human kind. The sound of waves, jazz and even the human heartbeat
echo through empty space. These are the markers of life on Earth? The details
we find most important to define our existence? Afterall the probe was launched
before home computers became commonplace so people did live empty lives during
which time their only entertainment was jazz, their only feeling of security a
steady heartbeat.
Men, Women & Children
seems to believe that this is how people today have come to think, and
awards itself the task of correcting this. Reitman, who wrote and directs, does
not shy away from topical subject matter — as in Juno, his landmark comedy about teen pregnancy and the abortion
issue; or Up in the Air, commentary
about the loneliness of economic hardship released in 2009, the heart of the
recession — and Men, Women &
Children is no exception. Just before concluding the Voyager 1 episode, the
audience is shown the famous Pale Blue Dot photograph, taken of Earth by
Voyager 1 from the furthest reaches of our solar system in 1990. It shows Earth
as an infinitesimally small spec in the vast ocean of space, a sobering thought
for the egotistic human race.
What the film does, by juxtaposing this humble dot with
commentary on the pervasiveness of social media is quite clever. Social media
is all about the individual, about self-promotion. It requires a degree of
healthy self-admiration, the sense that what you are doing or what you have to
say is worthy reading for others. While everything that makes up everyone alive
now, or has ever lived, or will ever lived is that lonely Pale Blue Dot, a
Tumblr page can be all about you. That’s what the Internet offers in Reitman’s
hyperbolized world view. Re-enforcement of one’s importance, of one’s beliefs.
If a high school girl feels like she needs to maintain a toxically low weight,
there’s a chatroom for that. If another needs to feel like her beauty is
appreciated, there’s a photo-sharing site for that. If a woman needs to feel
wanted again, there’s anonymous dating. What all of this invisible support
offers is the chance to forget about what is actually going on around you. The
aforementioned ordinary people no longer need to listen to parents, or do
auditions, or fall back in love because the Internet gives them options.
The omniscient narration carries throughout the picture and
underscores the public nature of the world of Men, Women & Children in which there is nothing truly secret
and no being truly alone. The film’s ensemble exists in a way that emphasizes
the accuracy of the term “World Wide Web,” because every one of the
many characters is connected by the climax.
They exist in ordinary places, ripe for social interaction: the
mall, the cafeteria, a football game. They just choose to keep their eyes
buried in their smart phones instead of striking conversation. Is this what
Reitman really thinks about high schoolers? TimeOut New York’s Josh Rothkopf
took a common complaint about the film and I think said it best: Men, Women & Children is “the
first Reitman film to make the 36-year-old director seem about 400 years
old.” Indeed, it seems out of touch, but the script exaggerates to make a
point, the part of this issue that I will not forgive is the innocence of the
adults.
Innocence is not a perfect word there, but it might be the
best. Yes, the “Men and Women” of Men,
Women & Children are just as devious as their younger counterparts —
especially the catastrophically miscasts Jennifer Gardner’s Patricia, an
overbearing mother who reads a transcription of every digital interaction her
daughter has — but they are shown to have skills their children lack. When
Tim, played by The Fault in Our Stars
revelation Ansel Elgort, approaches a girl he stumbles over his sentences and
chooses not to say much, saving the meat of the conversation for a later
Facebook message. His father, on the other hand, played by Dean Norris, asks a
woman out by being to-the-point, actually using words like, oh you know,
“date.” Why is high school football stud Tim so far behind his own
father, who is going through a divorce? “I guess I was just scared.”
The omnipresence of social technology — Words With Friends
with your spouse who is in the bed next to you — is alarming and, if accurate,
makes Reitman’s cautious commentary worth-while. Teens, in the height of their
years of social dependence get together to watch Netflix, for example, which
Reitman shows without saying anything about it. Undoubtedly, 15-year-olds in
the audience won’t even notice the irony, but adults will engage in a
collective eye-roll. But what can these parents do? Men, Women & Children has parents doing things on every extreme
from managing a promotional site for sexy photos to tracking cell phone
location at all times. Both modes are harmful, and conflicted parents somewhere
in between don’t fare much better.
Where Reitman’s smart commentary derails is when it seeks to
deliver the finishing blow, highlighting the consequences of social pressures
in the digital age. No fewer than two characters wind up having near-death
experiences, and a marriage threatens to dissolve. Men, Women & Children is an imperfect movie in many ways, mostly
stemming from the writer’s arrogance and Hollywood’s misguided need to cast
stars (with the exception of Judy Greer, who is tremendously tragic, the film
would have benefitted from new faces with which the audience can identify).
It’s It’s a Wonderful Life-esque
moral — that no matter how meaningless you feel, it is not worth dying over —
is done-to-death, as have its archetypal characters.
So it’s not a great piece of movie-making, so what? Men, Women & Children is an
important commentary that may ignite a passionate if small following, and its
ultimate question will spread and seek answers. At one point, a character says,
“Just let her be a teenager,” so, what exactly does that entail when
teenagers are as much themselves in role-playing games as they are on the bus?
