Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

'Men, Women & Children': Glum survey of miserable people

If The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby hadn't already co-opted the song and the allusion, you could call Men, Women & Children an Eleanor Rigby movie. That is, to quote Lennon and McCartney, "All the lonely people/Where do they all come from?"

Rosemarie DeWitt and Adam Sandler play an unhappy married couple in "Men, Women & Children." (DALE ROBINETTE / Paramount Pictures)
Rosemarie DeWitt and Adam Sandler play an unhappy married couple in "Men, Women & Children." (DALE ROBINETTE / Paramount Pictures)Read more

If The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby hadn't already co-opted the song and the allusion, you could call Men, Women & Children an Eleanor Rigby movie. That is, to quote Lennon and McCartney, "All the lonely people/Where do they all come from?"

Set in Austin, Texas, and adapted from a first novel by Chad Kultgen, Men, Women & Children offers a doggedly glum and entirely unoriginal survey of miserable people - teenagers in high school, texting, sexting, and cyberbullying, and their respective parental units, sneaking off to watch Internet porn, or to hotels for assignations with strangers they've "met" in chat rooms. Everybody is lying, to one another, to themselves. Everybody is sad. And the tools that were supposed to make us closer, to make communication more immediate, more intimate, have driven us further into our isolated worlds.

The only thing at all surprising about Men, Women & Children is the name on the director credit: Jason Reitman, who in Juno, Up in the Air, and even the oddball romance Labor Day, demonstrated a gift for bringing piercing humor to the darkest of situations. Somehow, though, the gravity of the subject here has sunk him - like a suicide with rocks in his pockets, jumping off a bridge.

It's a wonder the actors aren't showing bruise marks from all the heavy-handed direction, the unrelenting solemnity of the thing.

Others, however, stand no chance with the screenplay's transparent melodrama. Jennifer Garner is one-note and fussy as the aforementioned mother, hacking into her daughter's e-mail and Tumblr accounts. Adam Sandler, bearded and hangdoggy, oozes self-pity as the mopey spouse with a porn addiction - and with a wife (Rosemarie DeWitt) who has started cheating on him.

Emptiness and despair ricochet around their home; if they were cartoons, they'd be ducking missiles of the stuff. But Men, Women & Children isn't a cartoon. It wants to be real, terribly.

Instead, it's just terrible.

Men, Women & Children ** (Out of four stars)

Directed by Jason Reitman. With Adam Sandler, Jennifer Garner, Judy Greer, Kaitlyn Dever, Rosemarie DeWitt, Ansel Elgort. Distributed by Paramount Pictures.

Running time: 1 hour, 59 mins.

Parent's guide: R (sex, nudity, profanity, adult themes).

Playing at: Ritz Five.EndText

215-854-5629

@Steven_Rea

www.inquirer.com/onmovies.