Men, Women & Children is a good film until you start to think about it
On a surface level, ‘Men, Women & Children’ has some interesting stories and great acting, but the underlying message doesn’t really make sense.
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?
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