Men, Women & Children

The Dial-Up Tone of Human Connection

There’s a moment early in Jason Reitman’s *Men, Women & Children* where I kept genuinely checking my watch, not out of boredom, but out of sheer chronological confusion. Emma Thompson’s disembodied, omniscient voice had just started narrating the journey of the Voyager 1 space probe, floating through the cosmos carrying a golden record of human history, while quoting Carl Sagan’s "Pale Blue Dot." I'm not sure what Reitman intended with this framing device. Maybe it was meant to shrink our suburban anxieties down to a cosmic scale, a reminder of our shared insignificance. Instead, it feels like being trapped in a planetarium laser show while someone lectures you about the dangers of MySpace.

It’s a bizarre misstep for a director who built his reputation on the sharp, cynical intimacies of *Up in the Air* and *Young Adult*. Reitman usually operates with a scalpel. Here, adapting Chad Kultgen's novel, he brings a sledgehammer. The film attempts to capture the sprawling, messy reality of how the internet has rewired human relationships in a Texas suburb. You've seen the headlines. Porn addiction, anorexia forums, overprotective mothers tracking their kids' keystrokes, ex-jocks retreating into MMORPGs. It's all here, stacked so high that the narrative scaffolding threatens to collapse under the weight of its own anxiety. (I actually winced when a character casually referenced the real-life story of a Korean couple who let their baby starve while playing online games — it felt less like storytelling and more like a cheap scare tactic).



Visually, Reitman tries to bridge the physical and digital gap by overlaying the screen with text bubbles, search bars, and profile pages. We watch the characters' faces bathed in the clinical blue light of their devices while their digital conversations float in the empty space beside their heads. For the first twenty minutes, it’s a clever visual trick. You can see the disparity between the impassive, slack-jawed expressions on their faces and the frantic, exclamation-point-heavy emotions hovering in the air. But as the film drags on, the aesthetic becomes a crutch. We stop watching the people and start reading the screen.

Which is a shame, because when Reitman actually lets his actors breathe, there's real ache to be found. Adam Sandler plays Don, a husband trapped in a sexless marriage who spends his evenings seeking solace in internet pornography while his wife (Rosemarie DeWitt) lies next to him in bed, equally alone. I've always maintained that Sandler is one of our great tragic actors when a director knows how to use his natural lethargy. Look at what his body does in this film. He carries a physical heaviness, a permanent slump in his shoulders. In one quiet, devastating scene, Don sits in his teenage son’s bedroom, bathed in the glow of the monitor, scrolling through the boy's browser history. Sandler doesn't play it for shock or outrage. His face just sort of droops into a puddle of lonely resignation. He isn't angry at his son; he’s recognizing a mirror of his own quiet desperation.



Other actors fare worse under the script's heavy hand. Jennifer Garner is tasked with playing Patricia, a cartoonishly paranoid mother who operates like a one-woman NSA for her teenage daughter. Garner tries to ground the panic, but she's fighting a losing battle against dialogue that feels ripped from a local news panic broadcast. Then there's Ansel Elgort, coming fresh off his star-making, charismatic turn in *The Fault in Our Stars*. Here he plays Tim, a former football star who abandons the field for an online fantasy game after his mother walks out on the family. Elgort strips away his usual easy charm, replacing it with a defensive hollowness. When he interacts with his concerned father (Dean Norris), he barely makes eye contact, his gaze constantly drifting back to the comforting, controllable geometry of his computer screen.

The central problem isn't that the film is lying about the internet. It’s that it approaches the subject with the breathless panic of a late-night infomercial. As *The A.V. Club*’s A.A. Dowd noted, the movie "plays like a tone-deaf rant from people who stumbled online for the first time last week and couldn't believe what they saw". The internet isn't a monolith of despair; it's just the new weather we live in. By treating every click and swipe as a harbinger of moral collapse, Reitman flattens the genuine complexities of his characters into a series of flat cautionary tales.



Movies about "how we live now" always age terribly, mostly because they try to diagnose the present before the symptoms have settled. I kept wishing *Men, Women & Children* would simply turn the Wi-Fi off and let these people talk to each other. When they finally do — when Sandler and DeWitt finally confront the chasm between them without a screen buffering their emotions — the film briefly sparks to life. We don't need Carl Sagan or a deep-space probe to tell us that human beings are desperate to be seen. We just need a director willing to look at them without a pop-up window in the way.