How to be a big man

The movie we were watching is about the miseries of upper middle-class white folk. The kind of people who live in affluent bedroom communities and drive Mercedes, yet still manage to be angry and confused.

I don’t know why we picked this movie, other than this is the time of year when my wife and I are professionally obligated to watch a lot of movies that are offered “for our consideration.” We both write about movies, we both are active in various groups that vote awards to films. One of the groups she belongs to pays special attention to movies made by female directors; one of the groups I belong to is especially interested in how spirituality and religion is portrayed on screen.

If we were, as PETA would like us to say, looking to “feed two birds with one scone,” this one looked like a better option than, say, Deadpool 2.

Anyway, The Land of Steady

Habits is by Nicole Holofcener, a writer-director whose work I’ve admired in the past, and it’s adapted from a novel by Ted Thompson, about which I’ve heard favorable things. It stars a handful of actors I’d watch in just about anything: Edie Falco, Elizabeth Marvel, Bill Camp, Charlie Tahan (who you might know from Ozark) and Ben Mendelsohn, an ordinary-looking Australian who somehow infuses menace into every character he takes on. (I became familiar with him via the Netflix series Bloodline; he’s been around for a while.)

I’m glad I saw the movie. It’s been streaming on Netflix since the middle of September and I don’t think I’ll re-visit it in any end-of-theyear essays, but it got to me in a way that most movies don’t.

It reminds of a kind of novel that, with a certain precise diction and restraint, describes the privileged world of cut crystal and purebred retrievers I aspired to know and sometimes think I understand. Holofcener’s movie is like a John Cheever short story—suburban, Chekovian and populated mostly by men who fail and drink too much.

At first I didn’t like many of the characters; they were flawed and flailing and unable to summon the sort of discipline that might have allowed them to have lived less selfishly. But over the course of the movie their humanity is exposed, and they give us a chance to forgive them.

Mendelsohn’s character, Anders, a former Wall Street trader disillusioned by “a system of monstrous greed,” has left his wife Helene (Falco) and son Preston (Thomas Mann), a 27-year-old wastrel with a degree from Northwestern and no prospects of employment. Anders divorced her and left them, in a gesture of empty magnanimity, the Westport, Conn., mansion that backs up to the Long Island Sound.

Only he hasn’t told them he’s stopped making the mortgage payments.

When she finds out, his wife understands that he made the gesture because he wanted “to be a big man.” He wanted to be generous, to be kind, to be forgiving.

“But to be a big man,” she says, “you have to be a big man.”

I have known a few people— mostly but not exclusively men— like Anders.

I have seen them ball up and toss away lives as they try to rewrite their stories. I have seen them walk away from houses and people who counted on them. I’ve seen them burn through their equity in upscale bars, presenting as ridiculous to all eyes but those in the mirror, the only ones that matter.

I’ve seen some of their children sputter and stall. (Others simply incorporated the “bad father” into their own stories, using it as fuel or conversation piece. The people you love always have the potential to disappoint you.)

It is surprising that people don’t really learn much after they leave school; I know 60-year-olds who never mastered the basics of adulthood. They are the ones who answer the credit repair ads and fail to file their tax returns. Day drinkers and depressives. Victims.

I think we all have it in our capacity to muck things up. We are so easily made discontent.

Maybe the monks are right: less is better. A little wherewithal is a dangerous thing for some; we start feeling like we’re special and entitled to more than whatever we’ve got. Our particular palace begins to feel ordinary and onerous. We might look around and start to believe that we’re missing out on something, that our lives aren’t exactly congruent with our hopes and dreams. We don’t look like the people in the movies—our children aren’t as beautiful, our smiles aren’t as white, our clothes don’t fit as well.

And however small our difficulties may seem in relation to the rest of the world’s troubles, they are always real to us.

I am bothered by slights so small that to list them would seem comical—a balky browser, idiots who can’t operate turn signals or understand how crosswalks are supposed to work. It doesn’t matter that these are First World problems. They’re my problems, more of what I’ve got to put up with. They preoccupy me, it doesn’t matter that in the long run I understand they are negligible, they are my drama.

One of the things that makes us human is that all of us are sometimes angry and confused.

And the feeling of being alone in the world is terrifying no matter if you’re sleeping in a burned-out van down by the river or in a penthouse beside a supermodel.

So what you do, I guess, is the best you can. You try. You recognize the worth in other people.

Even divorced dads who discover freedom is a trap. Even spandexed mutant mercenaries. We’ll watch one of them tonight.