Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7.5/10
Cast: Adam Sandler, Jennifer Gardner, Rosemarie Dewitt, Judy Greer, Dean Norris, Emma Thompson, J.K. Simmons, Timothée Chalamet, Olivia Crocicchia, Kaitlyn Dever, Ansel Elgort, Katherine C. Hughes, Elena Kampouris, Will Peltz, Travis Tope, David Denman, Dennis Haysbert, Tina Parker, Shane Lynch, Phil LaMarr, Jason Douglas.
What makes Humanity so very different from the rest of Planet Earth’s inhabitants is the ability to talk and communicate in a way that is unlike anything else in the Solar System. However, in the last ten years, society seems to have become one in which to stop and chat, the general flow of conversation almost akin to a declaration of war and the sheer amount of information being passed on by the stroke of a ‘lol’ or any other abbreviated sentence is staggering. All are guilty of it in the modern age and the effect it has on relationships is plain to see.
It is in Jason Reitman’s Men, Women and Children in which modern day society is placed under the lens of a microscope and framed for all its worth.
Men, Women and Children seems to be unafraid to point out the phenomenon in which conversation has become as disposable as the lives that society lives in. the short tap of a status update and the easy, sometimes morally bankrupt, way in which someone’s actions can have people becoming a keyboard warrior without seeing the very real harm it does is alarming. The quick sound-bite, the unconscious sharpness of a text message is the underlying thread that binds several stories together and is punctuated and highlighted that communication in the modern age started out with much hope with the space craft Voyager sending out a message throughout the unknown galaxy.
The film itself is arguably closely akin to the British offering Love Actually, and Bill Nighy, Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson aside, is surprisingly a better take on the real life emotions than the sweet and fairly dank sticky feel that came with the 2003 release. Men, Women and Children looks at the lives of some of the population of a small town and offers a truth in that not everything ever runs true in a relationship, that they can be tested by control, by health, by trust and actually by love; a love that says that more than just fancying someone but that the person means more to you than life itself.
The well crafted ensemble plays out well and it may come as a bit of shock to some cinema goers to find Adam Sandler playing a character in which to have some sympathy with rather than the overbearing and often annoying person he is represented by on screen. It is small touches like that that make Men, Women and Children a film in which it is possible to believe that miracles do happen on celluloid.
With an excellent performance by Jennifer Garner as the uptight and controlling mother Patricia Beltmeyer, a woman who has forgotten what it means to trust and is such a hideous creation that Ms. Garner simply oozes undisguised hostility throughout, so much so that the audience will be shocked at just how unlikeable she is; even if she is a very caring mother.
With Judy Greer, Rosemarie Dewitt, the exceptional Ansel Elgort, the charming Elena Kampouris and a frustratingly cool Adam Sandler thrown together and with a splendid narration by Emma Thompson, the fault in our hearts is easy to see. The move towards a sterile form of communication in text messaging, facebook, twitter and all the other means of contact has become so embroiled in the small, sometimes meaningless transfer of information that we are as distant from what we hope to be as a species than the space-probe Voyager is as modern tool of reaching out to the stars.
To follow in the footsteps of a famous film maker is one thing, to follow in the deep crevices that those shoes have made by one of the finest is quite another but Jason Reitman is a natural talent who will capture a lot of hearts in Men, Women and Children, the film is more than well worth a look at.
Ian D. Hall