I watched with my iPhone out, taking notes on it as I sat alone in the theater with the latest from director Jason Reitman unspooling in front of me. As the man behind
Thank You For Smoking and
Up in the Air he will always have my attention, but as he somewhat pretentiously preached to what will no doubt be the choir about how technology has brought us together by pushing us apart I couldn't help but feel this was redundant and worst of all, boring. It makes sense as ultimately this is a film about people who are bored so it is a question of how to make boring people interesting and the conclusion seems to have been to cram as many boring people as possible into the story so there would be plenty of problems to fill out a 100-minute movie. That sounds harsh, but the problems don't stop there and the truth is this is such a dramatization of man-made, first world, too personal too understand when casting a wide net problems that it all comes off as trying and whiny. It isn't meant to be that way; Reitman clearly wants to elicit serious reflection, to inspire questions and probably even likes to think he reveals something to us about ourselves that we didn't already know, but as I sat tapping away at my screen I felt no remorse or reflection, but rather just appreciated the irony.
Men, Women & Children ends up coming off, not as a meditative look at how much closer to meaningless our existence is as we create such issues as those under examination, but rather a film so perverse, dark and one-note for the sake of being all of those things that it ends up feeling insignificant. I use "insignificant" because we are asked multiple times to consider what really matters in our world, but more than trying to offer some existential philosophy on how the ramifications of our instantly gratifying society weave into these issues I was instead left wondering if this was truly representative of the high school experience these days or has Reitman actually turned into as one note a director as I suspect his portrayals of the human race are. I understand the characters function as a means to tell a specific story and relay a certain theme, but while the film wants to cut deep in that it tries to get on a level typically reserved for minimal interaction it comes off more as a collection of extreme examples with no depth or dimensions to give us reason to feel affected or involved.
