Jason Reitman has certainly has had an interesting career. The son of Ivan Reitman who directed several of the 80’s most famous comedies including Ghostbusters (1984) and Twins (1988), Reitman Jr quickly built up a profile in the mid 2000’s for anachronistic dark but (usually) ultimately heartfelt comedies like Thank You For Smoking (2005), Juno (2007), Up In The Air (2009) and Young Adult (2011). Reitman also attracted Oscar attention, earning Best Director nominations for Juno and Up In The Air. I think what’s interesting about Reitman as a director and the kind of acclaim that he received is that it always was (and still is) questionable how much of the success of Reitman’s films is attributable to Reitman. Diablo Cody wrote Juno and Young Adult and Thank You For Smoking and Up In The Air are both based on novels, now while I definitely think Reitman benefits from collaboration but I definitely think that Juno especially benefits from his unique visual eye. But Reitman, perhaps irritated by these accusations wrote and directed Men, Women and Children (2014) and I found this movie to be such an (how should i put this?)… experience that I need to write about it so here you go.
Men Women & Children is based on a 2011 novel by Chad Kultgen, adapted for film by Reitman and Erin Cressida Wilson and tells the story of several different families whose lives are affected and shaped by their relationships to the internet. In theory I think that a look at the way that the internet has affected our lives and our relationships and our sex lives could be theoretically be interesting even if it will undoubtedly be dated just because of the way that internet evolves but Men, Women & Children has the most basic understanding of the internet and the way it can affect people’s lives, it feels like it was written by people who had just got the internet and have just found out what you can do on there. Yes Jason Reitman I know that there is porn on the internet, I know people can get addicted to internet porn and I know that porn can affect people’s sex lives but Reitman has little else to say and most of Men, Women & Children feels as underdeveloped, it feels very first draft in all the wrong ways. For example one of the teenage characters Chris (played by Travis Tope, which is… a name) is so addicted to porn ‘not deemed socially normal’ so that he can’t get an erection before having sex and then he kind of has sex with this one girl named Hannah and he fucks it up and then she says that they had sex so she could say she had lost her virginity at school… I understand that plot description was messy but that’s how so many of the plot threads feel in this film, they just kind of end.. And I think that this is a common truism about big ensemble led films but I think would be quite a bit better if it focused on literally any of these characters and I understand that Reitman intends the film to be some sweeping statement on the internet but ultimately his broad strokes don’t do his characters much good.
I don’t like to completely rag on a movie and there are occasional good parts of Men, Women & Children that maybe hint at a better movie. Ansel Elgort is a piece of shit and his ‘video game addiction’ storyline is hilariously cringe but I think that his romance with Kaitlyn Dever is decently sweet mostly because of the actor’s efforts and not because of the writing which is painfully generic and cringe but Elgort and Dever have enough chemistry that I occasionally felt slightly invested in their relationship which I can’t say for any other character. The score by Stephen Wilkinson works quite well in establishing the atmosphere of the film, the sort of monotonous nature of the internet that forms most of the pulse of our day yet we don’t even really notice it yet I’m sorry to say that those are basically all of the positives I have to say about the film. When you’re doing a huge ensemble piece and you’re not all that huge on plot, your characters have to be well written, nuanced and interesting/enjoyable to watch as we see them go about their lives and all of Men, Women & Children’s characters are so cliched it almost seems like an exercise to use every suburban cliche in one 119 minute runtime.
I think this is particularly evident in the relationship between Chris’s parents Don (played by Adam Sandler) and Helen (played by Rosemarie DeWitt) who have possibly the most boring affair I’ve ever seen in a film and it’s because there is absolutely no buildup or establishment for their relationship. It’s all vague allusions to the fact that their sex lives are pretty passe (…because of 9/11…for some reason) and Don masturbating to porn on Chris’s computer and a hundred other ‘suburbanites behaving badly’ cliches that maybe last seemed edgy or interesting when American Beauty (1999) won Best Picture. Don and Helen don’t conduct an affair because they feel so disillusioned by the iNtErNeT, they conduct an affair because of the plot conventions of movies like American Beauty, it all just feels so forced and inorganic (also I think it’s fucking hilarious that this film managed to capture the miliseconds of time that ashley madison seemed like a relevant cultural topic of discussion)
Speaking of American Beauty, I had the impetus to watch Men Women & Children because I saw Jourdain Searles (go follow jourdain, ur life will be the better for it and listen to her appearances on this had oscar buzz if you want joy in your life , one of the best critics working today whom I follow on letterboxd) log the film with the simple review of “American Beauty 3 (2 being Little Children).” which I think captures how much of Men, Women & Children is hilariously dated, it 100% has the air of something like The Safety of Objects from the early 00’s which prioritises its deranged ensemble and scope rather than its actual characters. Men Women & Children is basically just this but with an extremely hollow internet sheen, I don’t expect a film from 2014 about the internet to age all that well considering how fast the internet changes and evolves but Men, Women & Children feels like it is from the mid 00’s, barely after the era of movies like The Net (1995) where the internet is a magical world to explore and more of an alarmist lecture about how the InTeRnEt will destroy us all and it’s not like the internet doesn’t have an incredibly long list of cons but preachy claptrap has rarely ever worked.
Ultimately the writing is what sinks Men, Women & Children and the writing of its women in particular. Given that it is based on a book written by an author who also wrote books called The Average American Male, I wasn’t expecting a feminist treaty but Men, Women & Children writes its women so condescendingly. For example Jennifer FGarner’s character who is very strict (to say the least) on her daughter’s (Kaitlyn Dever) internet usage and while her behaviour is certainly extreme, it could be written empathetically, showing that ultimately her behaviour is routed in fear and love for her child. But she’s written like a maniac, someone who could be a psychopath or serial killer if she put her mind to it and it gives Jennifer Garner, a genuinely talented actress who gives such a wonderful, Oscar worthy performance in Reitman’s Juno absolutely nothing to play with and all she has is an utter caricature of a woman. Judy Greer and Rosemarie DeWitt’s characters also get similar treatments way worse than their respective male characters especially Greer which the movie almost seems to revel in: (let me put on my filmbro voice) “haha the mother who tried to slut her daughter out gets iced out and lose her relationship, isn’t that so great? lololol”.
Men, Women & Children claims to explore the shallowness of its characters as a result of the internet but in the course of its very thinly sketched examinations reveals itself to be as shallow as it claims its characters to be.
Rating: 1.5/5
Men, Women & Children (2014) is available to rent on YouTube and Amazon Prime.