“Men, Women & Children”
WARNING: Spoilers ahead
The word I’d use to best describe Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children would be, frankly, bad. It’s clear early on that the movie will be a sort of cautionary tale on the dangers of the internet and social media. The movie was released in 2014, a year in which Facebook, Twitter, and many other platforms had already exploded into everyone’s screen. The new iPhone 6 had also just come out, and Apple was at its most popular. Reitman’s film actually does address some interesting and very real issues here, but it was apparently he could not decide on which ones to focus on. The result is a jumbled mess of interconnecting stories that amount to nothing at all by their end.
There are about six or seven plotlines happening at once. While not exactly confusing, Reitman decides to showcase some characters more than others for no apparent reason. For example, one of the plotlines that is given the most screen time is about Rosemarie DeWitt’s character, Helen, and her husband Don, played by Adam Sandler. They play a bored couple that don’t have spark anymore, so each of them turn to the internet to secretly have an affair. Strangely, the internet plays very little part in this couple’s story. Of course people cheated on their spouses before computers existed, but it infuriates me that their storyline, like many others in this film, ends with little to no point. They both end up discovering one other’s infidelities, but they decide to do nothing about it, rendering one of the main plotlines seems rather worthless.
Elena Kampouris’ case is even worse; she plays Allison, a high school student dealing with anorexia. Now this is an important subject that needs to be addressed in a serious way, and it also works for the film’s main theme because Allison constantly goes on a website where girls obsess over the idea of not eating and being extremely thin. This comes early on in the film and I immediately thought it was a promising subject that might actually do some good. It didn’t. Not only was Allison’s story barely featured, but it also lacks any closure whatsoever. In short, her story is that she avoids eating so she can attract an older guy from her high school, and after having sexual relations with him, she miscarriages due to malnourishment. After that, not much happens with Allison, there is no clear change in her character other than she no longer likes the boy, so she throws a rock at his window. It’s so lazy and uninspired, it makes it look as if Reitman forgot about her story because he was focusing too much on other ones.
I can go on with each and every storyline from the film, but the point is that the screenplay does not do a good job whatsoever at addressing these conflicts. One might argue that it wasn’t Reitman’s intention to offer answers or happy endings, and one might be right. It might also explain why most performances on the film feel like all actors are about to fall asleep. Is it realistic? One may argue yes, but I would call it boring. I’ve seen realistic approaches at a performance like the one’s in Eighth Grade (2018) or even Boyhood (2014). I also think it shows when a 30-year-old man doesn’t know how teenagers talk to each other.
I wish I could easily dismiss Men, Women & Children as a harmless little forgettable movie, but I can’t. I guess in a way it was forgotten by society because I had never heard a single thing about this film until I stumbled upon it on Netflix the other day. I’d previously watched one scene in Twitter where Ansel Elgort beats up now superstar Timothee Chalamet, but I didn’t even know the title of the movie back then. I felt the need to write about this movie, not to bring it back into existence, but because I felt it did such a terrible job in all possible aspects that I needed to write about it in case someone was considering watching it.
The film has one small gay character; he’s friends with Allison and he’s featured in one scene for a couple minutes. The only thing I can say about it is that his character is a laughable stereotypical representation of a gay teenager. He talks in a very exaggerated tone, and I don’t know if it was supposed to be a funny moment onscreen or he was just so poorly directed and written. There is also a single black character in the film and his whole character consists of being the stud who is a better lover than Helen’s husband. So I confidently say that representation is terrible in this movie.
At the end, the one storyline that amounts to something is the one of Ansel Elgort, Kaitlyn Dever and Jennifer Garner. Elgort plays Tim Mooney, a sad teenager who is dealing with the abandonment of his mother, so he quits the football team because he doesn’t really like it. But guess what? His father, payed by Dean Norris, loves football and wants his son to keep playing. Wherever have we seen that before? It comes across as lazily familiar. To tie it into the whole Internet/technology subplot, Tim’s character actually loves to play a videogame on his laptop, something that his father obviously looks down on.
Tim falls for Dever’s character, Brandy. She’s a victim of her mother’s (Garner) constant harassment of social media. She plays one of those paranoid and overprotective mothers that tracks, checks and interferes with all of Brandy’s social media and internet activities. Obviously, at the end, she learns a lesson that I guess is supposed to teach the audience that maybe videogames and the internet aren’t all that bad? I thought that might be the overall message of the film, but given that many of the other storylines are unresolved or just ignored, it’s hard to say.
What I will say is that I found Men, Women & Children to be incoherent with its message, boring, bad for representation- not only for teenagers, but also other social groups- poorly written, and frankly, just weird. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone and I’d prefer if it remained forgotten as it clearly is.
