Men, Women & Children (2014)

Jason Reitman's Men, Women & Children arrived in 2014 as a sweeping diagnosis of the digital age, an ensemble of Texas teenagers and their parents all quietly ruined by screens. It opened in seventeen theaters, expanded to six hundred and change, and vanished with two million dollars against a sixteen million dollar budget. Critics called it mawkish. They were not wrong, though the film's failure is more interesting than its successes would have been. It wants to be a lament and settles for a lecture.

That lecture is delivered with a straight face and a narrator. Every thread, the porn addiction, the Ashley Madison affairs, the eating disorder, the MMORPG depression, the surveillance software, resolves into a lesson about connection and kindness, capped by an explicit closing instruction to cherish the earth. The film does not trust us to draw conclusions. It draws them for us, in marker, then underlines them. There is a genuine argument buried here about how technology reshapes intimacy, but it sits under a mounting pile of cautionary tales, each one more illustrative than the last.

On the social ledger, the film makes a few gestures. Its female characters carry the weight of sexual double standards, objectification, and parental control, though the treatment is teen-drama cautionary instead of anything resembling a thesis. The ensemble is overwhelmingly white, with minority faces drifting through as set dressing. Race goes unmentioned. So do class, queerness, and any structural critique of the economy that produced these anxious suburbanites. The result is a film with a moral and no argument, sincere, well-acted, and convinced that saying the thing is the same as meaning it.