Film Review: Reitman plumbs the hazards of technology
Several early reviews of Jason Reitman’s “Men, Women & Children” compare it to Paul Haggis’ “Crash”: For fans of the latter, the comparisons are meant to show the inferiority of Reitman’s film. For those (like me) who found “Crash” mechanical and contrived, the mere mention of Haggis’ film is used as a convenient critical cudgel: “Hey, if you thought that piece of cheese was brilliant, you’ll be in Velveeta heaven with this one!”
Comparison may be an easy form of shorthand in a reviewer’s arsenal, but after the first thousand or so reviews, it becomes necessary. (Actually, compari-mania tends to set in within the first dozen reviews, but that’s another story — one you can read all about if you hack into the memoir-in-progress on my hard drive.) TMOT, as any of the younger characters in “Men, Women & Children” might peck out on their cellphones. “Men, Women & Children” revolves around a whole lot of such cyber activity, licit and illicit, ethical and loathsome.
“Crash” is the wrong film to praise or bludgeon Reitman with. Way more appropriate is Ang Lee’s 1997 “The Ice Storm,” which likewise interwove the sex and emotional lives of a bunch of parents and kids in the modern version of Everytown, U.S.A. “Crash,” for better or worse, was quite explicitly about racial and ethnic relations, which “Men, Women & Children” shows no special interest in. (Just to bring the trivia full circle, it was “Crash” that won the Best Film Oscar widely expected to go to Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain.”)
The town in question is East Vista, Texas, which, to judge by the accents, must be inhabited almost entirely by non-natives. How fast is the world moving? Reitman rubs our noses in it early on: When a teacher makes an assignment about 9/11, it’s not, “What do you remember?” It’s “find someone to interview who remembers.” Yikes.
As in “The Ice Storm,” the adults of East Vista are sexually itchy and not very smooth about it, and their kids are even itchier and less smooth. But the growth of home computers, the Internet, email, the World Wide Web, cellphones, social media and a bunch of other stuff that I’m probably behind on has changed the rules more quickly and totally than the television, radio, the automobile, telephone, the steam engine, movable type, the lever and the wheel.
To paraphrase a noted Elizabethan writer, it is indeed a brave new world that has such devices in it. It demands an infinite variety of changes in how we approach our lives.
Among the major characters are Don and Helen Truby (Adam Sandler, Rosemarie DeWitt); both have roving eyes, hardly a new phenomenon among husbands and wives. Both go looking for partners online — through anonymous chat boards or hired escorts. Don does most of his cruising by furtively using the computer of their 15-year-old son, Chris (Travis Tope), who has been watching online porn since the earliest rustlings of puberty and has become wired to respond to cyberporn more than the real thing.
The incredibly young-looking Allison (Elena Kampouris) — apparently suddenly hot after a summer of dieting — has a mad crush on a jerk and sends him an over-explicit selfie. At the same time, she continues to starve herself with the support of like-minded online friends.
Youth is not a prerequisite for bad judgment in this crowd. Another Mom (Judy Greer) has put up a website to promote an acting career for her teenage daughter (Olivia Crocicchia), but has allowed the page to cross the lines of what used to be called decency.
The closest thing in the film to a villain (and also to a caricature) is Jennifer Garner’s Patricia, a mom so excessively worried about the dangers of the new technologies that she monitors daughter Brandy (Kaitlyn Dever) to an extent the NSA would envy. Not only does she invade every nook of privacy that Brandy finds, but she teaches other mothers how to emotionally imprison their children — lying through her teeth to drive home the need for complete control.
Like “Ice Storm,” “Men, Women & Children” mucks around in the tawdry (but true) cutting edge of our current culture — a culture that mutates too quickly for even the 30-something Reitman to keep up with (let alone someone like me). It feels authentic, but, research notwithstanding, the details of the teen behavior here could easily be so last year (or decade). When one of the adults makes a passing reference to Myspace, it’s the character, not Reitman, who is hopelessly outdated.
Most of the motivations are familiar; many would have been familiar to our grandparents. But the combination of speed and ubiquity in electronic, wireless communication doesn’t differ in a merely quantitative way. It fundamentally changes the very nature of human interaction. Both the often exploited anonymity and the tendency toward instantly universal dissemination have changed human interactions at their core. One repeated image in the film is a high school corridor full of moving students, almost all of whom are chattering in text on their cellphones rather than, you know, talking.
Reitman’s short filmography is impressive: This is his sixth feature, following “Thank You For Smoking,” “Juno,” “Up in the Air,” “Young Adult,” and “Labor Day” (the last the only disappointment in the lot). He is not free of sentimentality, but he keeps it in check (particularly in “Young Adult,” which was pretty brutal). “Men, Women & Children” goes a little soft toward the end, but it still lands plenty of painful punches.
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ANDY KLEIN is the film critic for Marquee. He can also be heard on “FilmWeek” on KPCC-FM (89.3).