Eisenberg directs moving tale about mom and son’s friction
In Jesse Eisenberg’s smart directorial debut, “When You Finish Saving the World,” Julianne Moore plays a Good Person, at least on paper. Evelyn runs a women’s shelter for victims of domestic abuse and other kinds of horrors. She drives an eco-friendly car. She listens to the classical music station. She eats Ethiopian food. She lives an unflashy yet undeniably privileged life in a nice suburban home with her husband and teenage son.
She is not what you might call “happy” in the traditional sense. Her state of being is more like one of smug satisfaction — or it might be were it not for her high school-age kid. Despite all her best efforts to mold him in her image, he has become his own person, and it’s a person she doesn’t really like.
The kid in question, Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard), decided some time ago that money and fame were what he wanted in life, and he has gotten a taste of both through a popular YouTube channel where he livestreams songs for a growing audience of young girls who then throw money at him through likes. He is also smug, in a different way, and resentful of his mother’s sanctimoniousness.
Ziggy seems to have been shaped in Eisenberg’s image, or at the least the image we have of him as an awkward, deeply insecure person who masks his flaws with cruelty and intelligence in films like “The Social Network” and “The Squid and the Whale.” Wolfhard embodies the cadence and emotionless affect of his director’s on-screen
persona perfectly.
The heart of the film is the aching missed connections between mother and son. They have, they know, so much to be grateful for and yet can’t seem to rise above their superficial differences. It’s discontented suburban white people, sure, but Eisenberg keeps it fresh, modern and piercing. This point is hammered in, sometimes too bluntly, as both glom onto what they imagine to be ideal companions outside of the home.
Ziggy develops a crush on a serious, politically motivated peer, Lila (Alisha Boe), and tries on a social justice persona to get in her good graces. He has not yet learned to distinguish kindness from romantic interest. And so he asks Evelyn for help on how to sound smart and political. Rather than using it as an opportunity to connect, she decides it’s a teaching moment to scold him to do the work. They are both right, and they are both wrong.
Ziggy is not the only party at fault. He at least has the excuse of his wild teenage brain to blame. Evelyn, on the other hand, does not. The capacity for immaturity is boundless.
Eisenberg’s script goes hard on this imperfect mother, and Moore fully commits to her awkwardness and cruelty that she hides behind her goodness. At the center where she works, she finds a stand-in son, a boy about Ziggy’s age who has come in with his mother to help her get some reprieve from an abusive husband. Kyle (Billy Bryk) is a decent and thoughtful kid — kind to a fault and eager to please. The fact that Kyle has emerged this “good” from a household so outwardly “bad” breaks something in Evelyn’s brain. She starts to claim Kyle as her own, dreaming about his future, taking him out to dinner, failing to see how uncomfortable she’s making him.
Eisenberg, who has already proven himself to be a talented, unsparing writer, shows promise as a director. His directorial debut is a biting, occasionally sweet character piece about unlikable characters that you still may want to root for; though it may be hard to admit, they’re not so different from us.