The powers and perils of technology
Reitman has much to say on a digital world
Men, Women & Children ★★★ 1/2 (out of five) Starring: Adam Sandler, Rosemarie DeWitt, Jennifer Garner, Ansel Elgort Directed by: Jason Reitman Running time: 119 minutes
That title pretty much covers everybody, although Jason Reitman’s newest film might also have been called Mothers, Fathers and Offspring (First World Edition). The ambitious subject is nothing less than how we live our lives in an increasingly digital-mediated world. (No texting during the screening, please!)
With much to say and only two hours to say it, the film necessarily stakes out extremes. At one end is Patricia (Jennifer Garner in severe-librarian attire), who follows her daughter’s every move in the online world with the thoroughness and trust of a prison warden. You’ve heard of helicopter moms? Welcome to drone parenting.
Her teenage daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) responds by hiding her phone’s SIM card and setting up a digital tree house on Tumblr, outside mom’s sphere of influence. She also reads books printed on paper. This may be the sort of eccentricity that first attracts Tim (Ansel Elgort), who has quit the football team in favour of spending time in a medieval-themed online role-playing game.
Giving new meaning to lax parenting, meanwhile, is Donna (Judy Greer), a failed actress determined to help daughter Hannah (Olivia Crocicchia) find the fame that eluded her. And if the price of future celebrity includes selling borderline-risqué pictures of the high-schooler online, then so be it.
Somewhere in the middle are Adam Sandler and Rosemarie DeWitt as Don and Helen, a married couple who have misplaced their sexual spark. Online pornography leads him to investigate the services of an escort, while she follows up on a television ad for Ashley Madison, a dating site whose slogan is: “Life is short. Have an affair.” Their son (Travis Tope) is following his father down the porn rabbit hole, with the result that he doesn’t know how to respond to Hannah’s real-life interest in him.
There are a handful of other characters, mostly parents who aren’t sure what to do (or even what they can do) about monitoring, controlling or just advising on their children’s online lives. Just about anyone with teenage kids today is too old to have grown up in an environment containing anything more complex than a 50-channel universe, rented VCRs and rudimentary video games. Sexting? Don’t make me lol!
Given the breadth of the story, and Reitman’s wise choice not to try to connect everybody in Crash-like fashion, some sections of Men, Women & Children work better than others. There’s a tragic scene in which a girl, obsessed with being thin, loses her virginity to a guy who makes it clear he couldn’t care less whether they do it or not. Later, a scene of Don and Helen pursuing their twin infidelities on the same night feels cringingly overplotted.
More effective though strikingly unusual is Reitman’s choice of a framing device — the Voyager 1 space probe, launched in 1977 and now drifting through interstellar space. In 1990 it took an over-the-shoulder photograph in which Earth appears as a pale blue dot.
Over images of the craft sailing past Jupiter, Saturn and beyond, the voice of Emma Thompson introduces characters and dispassionately narrates some of their doings.
Best not to over-analyze that, but we’re clearly meant to understand the relative size of our troubles and triumphs in the vastness of the universe, and perhaps also to relate to the meaning of the voyage. Like that ship, we continue to push outward, questing. Maybe there’s a new shore on which we eventually land. Or maybe we just keep going.