Jesse Eisenberg Directs a Movie About Liberal Neurosis
When You Finish Saving the World follows a family of Good Liberals in a college town in the Midwest: Mother Evelyn (Julianne Moore) is an icy-cold social worker who runs a women’s shelter; father Roger (Jay O. Sanders) is a tepid university chancellor, who, like any NPR donor, concerns himself with questions like “Is it cultural appropriation if my son livestreams himself playing the blues?”; and only child Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard) is a 16-year-old who’s proudly amassed a following of 20,000 fans on Hi-Hat, a Twitch knockoff, on which he plays painfully cloying and lyrically clumsy “folk music with alternative influences.” Ziggy even sports a beanie ostensibly intended to be his “merch” throughout the film. (How Ziggy manages to hit 20,000 followers instead of miring in obscurity remains one of the film’s biggest unanswered questions. Must be the lottery of the algorithm.)
This film, Jesse Eisenberg’s directorial debut, throws no punches. There are no jump scares, no tragic death scenes, and no tear-jerking monologues. And yet, it is the most uncomfortable film I have ever seen. More than just uncomfortable, really. It is anxious. If a movie could be described as fidgeting — or better yet, autistically stammering, as Eisenberg portrayed Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network — then this one should be. Amazingly, it succeeds in walking a tightrope between nonstop tension and plotlessness, yielding 90 tense minutes devoid of the conflicts that characterize traditional narratives.
If When You Finish Saving the World is about anything, it’s about how self-obsession has a nasty way of warping relationships underneath its weight. Everyone in the Katz family sees right through the people in their lives. Everyone is a canvas at the ready, awaiting the paint of the Katz family’s particular neuroses.
Evelyn channels her feelings of rejection by her son, Ziggy, into an obsession with Kyle (Billy Bryk), the teenage son of one of the women in her shelter. The fixation is strange and cringe-inducing. “You’re not going to become your father,” she says at one point, in one of many moments of outward psychological projection that make it unclear if Evelyn is trying to use Kyle as a stand-in son or a stand-in lover or a stand-in self. She takes Kyle to a yuppie Ethiopian place and tricks him into eating spicy food. She tries to “pull some strings” to get him accepted into a program at Oberlin. She is blithely unaware of why he and his working-class mother from a broken home are uncomfortable by the displays.
Then there’s what Evelyn is reacting to, or at least what I imagine we’re supposed to assume she’s reacting to, which is her tenuous relationship with her son. Yes, Ziggy is self-absorbed, as you’d expect any teenager who’s that preoccupied with his social media presence would be. And as self-absorbed teenage boys are wont to be, he’s rude, even downright cruel, to his mother. But the flip side is that Evelyn makes not one genuinely maternal gesture toward her son throughout the movie.
When Ziggy asks Evelyn if she can drive him to school, she waits exactly five seconds for him to get ready before leaving without him. She shows no support for his inane-but-distinctly-teenage aspirations for musical fame. What’s strange is that Evelyn appears interested in music. One might imagine a progressive music lover would encourage her son to home in on the craft of music-playing. She dismisses his interest entirely, choosing to wallow in the distance between them instead of closing the gap.
Ziggy, too, is projecting. At school, he develops a crush on a girl named Lila, a stand-in for his mother. And like his mother, Ziggy’s crush on Lila is downright weird. Ziggy admires her for being “political” (in the same way that mother is, but he doesn’t connect those dots) but seems to display no actual interest in understanding who she is or what motivates her. Or even what those “politics” are. The shallowness of his crush isn’t lost on Lila, who rightfully rejects him.
Of course, Ziggy doesn’t understand why Lila and her friends don’t like him. While Ziggy thinks it’s because he’s not smart enough, it’s obvious to everyone else that the crush just makes no sense. He doesn’t recognize the incompatibility and the contrived nature of his attempt at connecting with her. It’s not that Ziggy and Lila are different on the surface and share a deeper kinship — there is nothing there except a vague personality resemblance to his mother.
Though it’s an uncomfortable watch, When You Finish Saving the World isn’t a bad movie. If its goal is to hold a mirror up to the queasiness of our present moment, then it’s done its job, and it’s done it well. Like Tár (2022), it feels like what will be the first of an avalanche of critiques of an era defined by narcissism shielded by moralizing, one we’re (hopefully) finally beginning to leave behind. It’s a critique of an era in which everyone is so concerned, but it’s a concern that starts with — and, despite appearances, ends with — the self.