Oh what a tangled web!
Yes, the internet can poison lives, but this convoluted morality tale has nothing new to tell us
Men, Women And Children (15)
Verdict: Glib morality play
St Vincent (12A)
Verdict: Saccharine but oddly satisfying
THE thumping great paradox of the information age, with its range of communication tools that we couldn’t have begun to imagine even 20 years ago, is that we’ve forgotten how to communicate.
Where once we talked to each other, now we email, text, tweet. Where it used to be hormones that complicated relationships between teenagers and their parents, now it’s also Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram. Some children spend more time on games consoles than they do at school. We’re all being swept to hell, along the information super-highway.
That, in a nutshell, if you’ll entertain such an old-fashioned image, is what Jason Reitman’s film men, Women and Children is all about. It is based on a novel of the same name by Chad Kultgen, and although it focuses on suburban Texas, it might just as well be Tynemouth or Towcester, or any community where satellite technology has fractured understanding and empathy between generations.
The film begins, arrestingly, with a shot of the Voyager space probe, moving towards distant galaxies. a plummy voiceover by Emma Thompson tells us that the probe has been filled with information about life on Earth, for the benefit of any extra-terrestrials who might encounter it.
The message seems to be that our planet is a mere speck in the universe, yet made up of myriad lives, loves, troubles and triumphs, all of them — or at least all of them in countries where this picture is likely to get an airing — suddenly in the clammy grip of the World Wide Web.
Thompson’s narration then narrows in on individuals, such as Don (adam Sandler), stuck in a stale marriage with nothing in common with his son Chris (Travis Tope) except, he discovers, a passion for online pornography.
and Chris himself, whose reliance on internet porn has become so intense that he can’t handle an actual fleshand-blood relationship with his schoolmate Hannah (Olivia Crocicchia), who in turn has problems of a different sort; her mother sees nothing wrong in her having her own website, on which she poses in her underwear.
Reitman does not knowingly leave out any kind of dysfunction that might be caused or magnified by cyberspace. Hannah’s mother Donna (Judy Greer) is shockingly naïve, but another highschool mom, Patricia (Jennifer Garner), is absurdly over-protective, rigorously policing the Facebook and mobile phone accounts of her daughter Brandy (Kaitlyn Dever) beyond all reason, to the very brink of tragedy.
For those of us in the audience who are only mildly anxious parents of teenagers, it’s a confusingly mixed message: are we too concerned, or nor concerned enough?
REITMAN weaves together all these lives with considerable skill. Brandy’s boyfriend Tim ( ansel Egort) is addicted to the online role-playing game Guild Wars, preferring a parallel reality after his mother walked out on him and his Dad ( Dean norris), and then discovering via Facebook that she is getting remarried. It is slickly done, but there is a line where slick becomes glib, and Reitman crosses it.
The wryly satirical touch that characterised his best films, Juno (2007), Up In The air (2009) and Young adult (2011), has been replaced here with a crashing lack of subtlety, so that when he shows us into a bulimic girl’s bedroom, it is rather improbably festooned with pictures of skinny models, loudly inviting us to put two and two together
where her parents have failed. his other misjudgment is thompson’s narration. it is too starchy, too Nanny McPhee.
She enunciates every word to within a syllable of its life. And while i can see why he might have thought it funny to put some terribly rude words into such a frightfully English mouth, the joke soon wears thin.
Yet for all that, there are more reasons to see this film than not to. it is very well-acted, not least by its troupe of youngsters. there are some memorable images, such as that of a shopping mall where everyone, but everyone, is tapping away on phones, the screens projected alongside them.
And finally, just because he uses a sledgehammer, doesn’t mean that Reitman hasn’t hit the nail on the head. the internet, social media and so on might be wondrous things, but maybe we were healthier without them.
ONE of the oddities of St Vincent, which actually didn’t strike me until after i’d seen Men, Women And Children, is that the little boy in it, Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher), seems blissfully unaware of Facebook, or video games. he prefers to watch old re-runs of Abbott and Costello. Which in this day and age, alas, makes him either a weirdo, or thoroughly unbelievable.
it is to the credit of writerdirector theodore Melfi, and of the talented young Lieberher himself, that Oliver seems neither of these. But the person who really yanks the film out of the vat of schmalz in which it might easily have sunk without trace, is Bill Murray. he plays Vincent, an incorrigible old grouch whose miserable life in blue-collar Brooklyn ticks every cliché of loser-dom.
he’s overdrawn, in hock to his bookie, drinks and smokes too much, and doesn’t seem too fond of his Russian prostitute girlfriend (Naomi Watts, oddly cast, but surprisingly convincing). And when a woman also down on her luck moves in next door, he sees her only as an inconvenience.
this is Maggie (Melissa McCarthy, showing a dramatic range that wasn’t even hinted at when she was struggling with her bowels in Bridesmaids), who is in the throes of a divorce, fighting for custody of little Oliver, and struggling to hold down a nursing job.
Against her better judgment, she is forced to rely on Vincent as a child-minding service. And it’s no spoiler to reveal what happens next, since it is blindingly obvious practically before the opening credits have rolled.
Vincent and Oliver bond, the boy helping Vincent to dig deep and find the best of himself, to the point at which Oliver, required by his school to nominate someone as a secular saint, chooses . . . well, i won’t go on, save to add that Murray is as watchable as ever and while it is all as intensely sweet and formulaic as Coca-Cola, it’s also, in its way, similarly pleasurable.