Cinemazlowski Film review: 'Men, Women and Children'

Oct 17, 2014

We live in a world with more communication tools than ever before, yet we seem to be losing the ability to talk straight with each other. Between texting, TV, Tivo, Roku, and role-playing games alone, we rarely enjoy each other’s simple company and the lost art of conversation.  We can embrace more of the world, yet we hear about loneliness more than ever.

Jason Reitman’s new movie “Men Women & Children” tackles these issues head-on, with the incisive and powerful dramedy serving as a wake-up call to take back our relationships and our families from the dangerous ledges we place them upon in the Internet age. It depicts a roundelay of relationships in Austin, Texas, a red state town that Hollywood normally dismisses as flyover country rather than paying genuine attention to the lives found within.

The plot will sound extreme at first, and many people will find at least some of its content pretty offensive in the first half. However, Reitman (who directed the superb movies “Juno” and “Up in the Air”) and his team are forcing us to take a long, hard look at where society is going and whether we have enough decency left to stop it – and making audiences feel (most of the sex and nudity and pornography involved is implied or discussed, not shown or barely shown) how bad we have become in this case is a powerful part of the point. And without giving away exactly who, what or how, note that the characters wind up making the right decisions in the end.

The movie follows several families in quiet crisis, focusing foremost on the bland marriage of Don (Adam Sandler) and Helen Truby (Rosemarie Dewitt), who have a teenage son who spends a lot of his time secretly watching porn and masturbating in his room. It’s soon revealed that Don does the same thing, and even sneaks into his son’s room to use his porn, because it is even more perverse than his own. The men are described by the narrator (Emma Thompson) as being so perverted by their pornography habits that they cannot become aroused without such images in their minds, and have thus been warped by the pornography (which again, is largely unseen, but discussed or implied, in the movie).

Don and Helen are so unhappy, in fact, that he pursues a call girl for sex and Helen goes to a website that sets up adulterous encounters. Meanwhile, the story also follows a mother who is a failed actress who has returned to her Texas roots to raise the daughter she became pregnant with by a producer who took advantage of her years before in Los Angeles. She transfers her desire for stardom onto her daughter, and sexualizes her image and thinking as a result – creating a poisonous parent-child relationship results in other consequences throughout the movie.

At the heart of it all is a young teen couple who do not pursue pornography or sex or even any high-tech means of communicating. They are shown as a naïve, pure, innocent ideal and the movie follows their story largely through the lens of the girl’s mother (Jennifer Garner), who is  excessively intrusive into her daughter’s life, spying on her in every way possible.

All these various extremes slowly spin out of control, causing the characters’ lives to ping pong against each other in ways that are mostly unpredictable, and divided between both funny and sad moments. These powerful messages are expertly acted by an impressive cast, and powerfully written by director Reitman and Erin Cressida Wilson.

The one annoying aspect of the movie that clashes with the strong moral lessons the characters arrive at comes from embracing the words of the late famous astronomer Carl Sagan and his humanist/atheist agenda. He is quoted at four points – two by the narrator and two by the teen boy with pure intentions – about his belief that earth is a pale blue dot in the universe and that our lives are all meaningless in the span of eternity.

However, it could be that the movie refers to it as an example of the fact our modern self-absorption comes from an inflated self-worth and that we could all stand to remember that we are not the center of the universe.

Some other reviewers have found "Men Women & Children" heavy-handed in its moralizing, but this isn’t a poorly made piece of fire-and-brimstone hysteria along the lines of this spring’s surprise Christian-film hit “God’s Not Dead” but an unmistakably adult film that has a passionate point of view about daily life issues that need to be addressed. As I left the packed early screening I attended, the audience I saw it with was immediately engaged in intense conversations afterwards about the funny and serious extremes with which they, their family members and others have found themselves mired in digital obsession.

 And that sound of conversation is the sound of hope that we can keep ourselves from going too far off the rails if we only try.