Men, Women & Children *** (Kaitlyn Dever, Rosemarie DeWitt, Ansel Elgort, Jennifer Garner, Adam Sandler) – Movie Review

Talented director Jason (Juno) Reitman’s comedy drama adapts Chad Kultgen’s novel and takes a smart and satirical aim at the lack of real human communication in the digital age. Fair enough, but it’s an easy target and there are only obvious points to score here. The Internet has changed relationships, ways of communication, self-image, and love lives. We get it. We know. (By the way, do you know that Italy has one of the lowest uses of the Internet in Europe with a third of the population never having touched a computer?)

Nevertheless, there’s much stylish fun to be had watching an entire group of high school teenagers and their parents stuff themselves royally through use of the Internet. It’s the freshness in the characters, situations and dialogue that would matter here, and they are reasonably well taken care of, at least in the film’s fresh and funny first hour.

The second hour starts to drift, and go sour, as the film’s dull message bites in and Jennifer Garner’s overprotective suburban parent is demonised into an unsubtle Wicked Witch/ Mary Whitehouse character. It’s hard to believe it when she makes her daughter Brandy (Kaitlyn Dever) surrender her cell phone on a regular basis so she can read her emails and text messages,  pours over pages of chat logs and uses a GPS locator app to monitor her daughter’s movements. It’s possible, of course, but Garner has an impossible character to play, and you start to dislike her, and then the film too because of it. Dever, though, is first rate.

A second interlinked story involving Judy Greer as an unwitting mother trying to live through her daughter (Olivia Crocicchia) doesn’t seem to get anywhere much. A bit more interesting is the story involving Adam Sandler as dreary Don, whose sexless marriage to Helen (Rosemarie DeWitt) finds him sneaking into his son’s room to feed his Internet porn addiction, while his wife struggles with the temptation of using a cheating website to start an extramarital affair. DeWitt is excellent, outperforming a miserable looking Sandler, but then, to be fair, that is the part.

Much more interesting, and much better acted, is the story involving Ansel Elgort as star running back Tim, who quits the football team to spend his time in online role-playing games. He believes in Carl Sagan’s idea that nothing matters in the grand scheme of things, so why bother with a pointless activity like football? Tim enjoys making connections in a virtual world, while growing distant from his father (Dean Norris), who’s struggling with the departure of his wife.

That ‘smart’ thing includes the look of the movie, with its computer graphics, though the film’s continual use of these on reliance on them starts to pay fewer dividends in the second hour. There’s also a completely unnecessary narration by Emma Thompson, who’s employed only to use her plummy luvvy tones to say rude words. This is a mistaken wrong turn. It might have been funny, but it isn’t.

Men, Women & Children was shown proudly at the London Film Festival, and it has pedigree and status. But it’s stubbornly just not one of Reitman’s best. Nevertheless, it’s one to see and argue over. At any rate, it’s big improvement over 2013’s Labor Day. And it’s worth seeing for the performances of Dever and Elgort, both touching and credible.

It’s rated R or 15 for strong sexual content including graphic dialogue throughout, some involving teens, and for strong language. Perhaps this is not a movie for kids, but it should be, for older teens.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Movie Review

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