Men, Women & Children is a good film until you start to think about it

I’ve talked about technology before and how it affects and changes us. There are the ones that do a good job of talking about it, like Her, with its dangerous but hopeful look at humanity’s future. Then there are the ones like last year’s Disconnect, which was basically mediocre and a box office bomb about “scary new technology.” Watching this new movie, I was strongly reminded of Disconnect, which isn’t really a good thing. Sometimes after seeing a movie, I change my mind after thinking about it. That’s the problem with thinking too much: you might realize something you didn’t want to realize. Like that something you liked wasn’t as good as you remembered. Case in point …

Men, Women & Children is the latest film from director Jason Reitman, known for such movies as Juno and the underrated Young Adult, based on the novel by Chad Kulgen. The movie uses a series of mostly interconnected storylines, each about a particular family or character. Throughout it all, there’s the unsubtle way technology affects our lives. At first I didn’t think it was meant as an overarching theme, that it wasn’t simply “technology has made a lot things harder.” I had the radical idea of being optimistic, of assuming that it was more along the lines of “the more things change, the more they stay the same” and “hey, we’re all humans here.” Those messages are in the movie, but they are undercut by the problematic elements. The film is wrapped with footage of the deep space probe Voyager 1 as it leaves our solar system, while Emma Thompson provides amusing and not frequent enough narration and commentary. In point of fact, it wasn’t until after the movie ended that I realized there wasn’t nearly enough of her, as she was consistently excellent. But that’s just the wraparound — what about the characters?

There’s the bubbly cheerleader Hannah (Olivia Crocicchia) who’s “momager” Donna (Judy Greer) takes borderline inappropriate photos of her daughter to further her potential showbiz career. Hannah is interested in fellow high-schooler Chris (Travis Trope), but due to years of increasingly perverse online pornography, Chris requires odder and more unusual ways of achieving arousal. Both of these are real life sorts of things; look at Toddlers & Tiaras for the inappropriate underage exploitation, and there are plenty of case studies about online pornographic images. But Hannah is pretty well drawn, damaged in an interesting way, while Chris seems more like a joke. Hannah’s mom … I’ll get back to her in a bit. Moving on, Chris’ parents, played by Adam Sandler and Rosemarie DeWitt, are experiencing marital issues. Each uses the Internet to pursue extramarital affairs, which is, you know, not something invented by the Internet. Just saying. This storyline was okay, being mostly slow for a while, and finally getting interesting near the end of the movie. This was certainly the best I’ve seen Adam Sandler in several years.

Donna is dealing with her own issues, like loneliness and bitterness over her failure to be a successful actress, but then she meets Kent (an amazing Dean Norris), the father of Tim (Ansel Elgort) the former star of the high school football team. Why former? Because he quit after his mother left them for California and a new man. He’s also exchanged football for many hours playing online role-playing games, although if this part was meant to be cautionary too, it didn’t really work. People can certainly spend too much time on games; I’ve done it myself back in the day, and I knew a kid in college who had difficulties because he played too much. Still, here it seems oddly realistic, but the message isn’t so clear. Tim has also become obsessed with Carl Sagan’s classic existential work Pale Blue Dot, which I encourage everyone to read. But he’s also now obsessed with fellow outsider Brandy (Kaitlyn Dever), whose overbearing mother Patricia (Jennifer Garner) monitors every aspect of her daughter’s online behavior, including tracking her phone’s location.

This storyline is a bit exaggerated, although of course there are plenty of alarmist parents like her out there. Patricia is painted clearly here as a sort of villain, albeit a complex one — she’s not evil, but merely extremely paranoid. I liked her performance here, but the two kids, Ansel Elgort and Kaitlyn Dever, were basically the true heart of the movie. Through them we connect more to Kent and Donna, allowing the great acting of Dean Norris and Judy Greer to shine. When Dean Norris plays the concerned and broken father, that’s when I truly felt something real in this movie, although the charming romance between the two kids worked well too. This is a movie about pain. Finally there’s the almost independent story of Allison (Elena Kampouris), a girl suffering from anorexia and wondering about losing her virginity, a story that could be in any era except for the insertion of the pro-starving websites (which are a real thing, in point of fact). In general, this story was the weakest.

That said, when the movie wanted you to feel pain, it worked. When it tried to push a message, it didn’t. The acting was excellent throughout, with the few standouts I’ve mentioned. Some storylines worked better, far better, than others, but I didn’t really consider any to be failures. I guess when I didn’t realize the “Internet bad or good?” simplicity of message, I liked this movie better, thinking it was about characters and humanity. You know: It’s all we have, etc. The technological aspect was just one theme, not the theme. But then again, pretending you don’t notice what you don’t like is also a pretty human thing to do. So we’ve all learned a little something about ourselves today. Like that director Jason Reitman should pick better source material next time.