Jason Reitman has decided to follow Labor Day with a closer look at the modern Internet age and how it relates to the Voyager 1 space probe and a Korean couple that neglected their child to the point it died while they played a video game. Overprotective parents, clueless parents, teenage pregnancy, selfies, adultery and much, much more are all part of the equation in a world where the Internet has distracted us to the point of isolation. The film is bookended by voice over from Emma Thompson chattering away about this and that and to be honest I could hardly care about, let alone remember, a word she said and I felt very similarly about nearly every character in this over-stuffed movie.
Reitman along with Erin Cressida Wilson (Chloe) have adapted the story from the book by Chad Kultgen, examining the lives of several teenage children and their parents and how our ever-increasing dependence on the Internet has infiltrated our lives and relationships.
In the beginning it seems like this film may be onto something as two girls talk trash about one of their friends over text right in front of her, though, obviously, without her knowledge. A teen boy (Ansel Elgort) decides to quit the football team, opting instead to get lost in he world of an online video game. Another boy’s porn addiction stunts his sexual growth while his parents (Adam Sandler and Rosemarie DeWitt) have lost that loving feeling and go looking for affection elsewhere.
These are just a few of the scenarios presented and they are certainly reasonable, but when presented as part of a hodgepodge of similarly themed aspects of the same issue it not only becomes overbearing, but eventually leaves Reitman no way out. The only option left is to resort to overly dramatic conclusions, essentially turning the entire film into a series of extreme examples such as the Korean couple mentioned earlier, an example the film itself refers to as extreme, but seemingly forgot to heed its own warning.
Reitman would have done well to focus on one story in particular, that being the one involving an overprotective mother (Jennifer Garner) and her daughter, Brandy (Kaitlyn Dever), who must live with her mother tracking her every key stroke as well as wherever she goes via GPS. Brandy even believes she must keep her budding relationship a secret for fear her mother will shut it down.
There is enough drama in this story alone to get across what I assume was intended to be the point of the film. That being the disconnect from real life (or “RL” as one of the characters refers to it) causes for confusion across the generations, and we must learn to pull our noses out of our gadgets and focus more on the organic life in front of us. But it’s hard to say any of that comes across within the film’s narrative. Instead all we get are generic characters making bad decisions. The result is a movie less about the technological world we live in and more about poor decision making skills.
Although the cast is stacked, Dever and Elgort are the stand-outs, but that’s probably because their story is the only one that seems to have been thought out beyond being a stereotype of online societal decay. Additionally, Dean Norris is much better than I expected and it’s nice to see him in a role far afield his work in “Breaking Bad” and someone needs to tell Jennifer Garner’s agent it’s enough with her playing the tight-ass in damn near every film. She’ll be lucky if she hasn’t been officially type cast already.
In the end, too many plot threads on a road to nowhere results in a film struggling to find a grasp. Disconnect attempted to explore similar territory a few years ago in a similar way and did it much better, but still struggled with the idea of having too many balls in the air. However, in the final moments of Disconnect, director Henry Alex Rubin had a far greater respect for his audience than Reitman does here.
There is something to discuss within the narrative of Men, Women & Children, but as it is presented, the message gets lost in the noise, or as the film likes to bring up over and over, the message is the Pale Blue Dot as taken by Voyager, lost in a sea of stars. Reitman’s view of the subject is to forget what’s at the heart of the story and instead begins focusing on everything around it, eventually rendering the topic only a speck in the distance and finally, becoming the very extreme it sets out to judge.
