This may sound overly alarmist, but considering the nature of the work in question, it’s only fair: no film in the medium’s history has been as straight-off-the-bat terrible as Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children.
The opening credits haven’t even finished as Emma Thompson narrates a brief history of the Voyager spacecraft as a pinnacle technological achievement, before being pointedly juxtaposed with Adam Sandler looking up porn on his son’s computer in a suburban home in Whitepeoplesville, USA. The message is clear: what has our ‘connected’ world done to us?
It’d be nice to say the film steadily improves from there, especially in light of its poisonous critical and commercial reception after opening in the US months ago – kicking a dog when it’s down is an ugly practice, and besides, it’d have to get better, right? Alas, that opening salvo proves to be the rule rather than the exception, as the story criss-crosses between the lives of a handful of dead-eyed, iGod-enslaved, middle-class lost souls (played by Sandler, Rosemarie DeWitt, Judy Greer, Dean Norris and Jennifer Garner, among others), whose myriad problems would easily be solved by looking at each other instead of their various screens, which have facilitated bulimia, adultery, bad sex, and worse spelling and grammar.
It’s difficult to keep up with the film’s problems, which apart from the overriding tone of hysterical technophobia, include hackneyed filmmaking (every instance of written communication appears in an onscreen caption like a cartoon storm cloud, and Reitman seems to think that there’s no cliché that a handheld camera can’t fix), questionable depictions of race (one of the very few non-white cast members is Dennis Haysbert as an African-American lothario only a few degrees removed from South Park’s Chef), and only scant instances of recognisable human behaviour. I guess one could commend Reitman for his go-for-broke audacity at diagnosing society’s ills, and – after a filmography of snarkfests like Juno and Up In The Air – that he’s obviously trying to branch out with more earnest fare. On that more upbeat note, I’ll end this review and stop staring at my laptop screen, before it ruins my life even more.
1/5 stars
Men, Women & Children opens in cinemas on Thursday November 26.
