Before it left our solar system forever, the Voyager 1 probe spun around and took our picture. “Pale Blue Dot,” as that photo has became known as, shows Earth, humankind’s only home, suspended in a fraction of a pixel against a cosmic infinity, a semi-speck of meaning floating, lost in a shroud of the impenetrable unknown. How fitting that “Men, Women & Children,” released Oct. 17, dwells so much on it.
The idea is — and astronomer Carl Sagan put it better at the time — that every human being that was, is and ever will be lived out his or her life on that pale blue dot. Empires crumble and species disappear, but the universe pays no mind. As director/writer Jason Reitman and co-writer Erin Cressida Wilson go on to explain, this perfectly frames their vision of the state of human relationships in the Internet age. Exactly why is never clear.
Through some inexplicable Nova-style narration, Emma Thompson walks us through it: Every member of the film’s unwieldy ensemble has a unique and disparate struggle to cope with in this lowly Texas town, each touched in some way by technology.
After his mother splits for California, star athlete Tim (Ansel Elgort) decides he’d rather play online game “Guild Wars” than football, which troubles his now-single father, Kent (Dean Norris), whose only connection to Tim is through coaching the high school team. Helen and Don (Rosemarie DeWitt and Adam Sandler) miss the passion in their marriage and take to Google to plan complementary affairs. Brandy (Kaitlyn Dever) finds she can only escape her helicopter mother (Jennifer Garner) by donning a neon bob wig and hitting her secret Tumblr.
Of course, it’s important to note that you can’t blame the actors’ inevitably silly performances for what’s actually a silly script. Though it feels weird writing it, Adam Sandler might actually be wasted here. His sad sack in “Children” calls to mind his sad sack in “Punch-Drunk Love,” minus the compelling danger and instability.
Ability is not the issue. Instead, Reitman and Wilson do an excellent job of crafting characters that you’d never actually meet in real life. It’s as if the two researched using terrible soap operas or had only read about teenagers one time in a bargain-shelf young adult book and thought they’d take a crack at it. Tim is the secretly sensitive football player. Brandy is the misunderstood loner who’s never kissed a boy.
On the other hand, there’s the cheerleader, Hannah (Olivia Crocicchia), who lies about her hypersexuality out of embarrassment of her own virginity. There’s her mother (Judy Greer), who pressures Hannah to keep a racy “modeling” website and pursue acting because, of course, it didn’t work out for her however many years ago. There’s the other cheerleader, Allison (Elena Kampouris), who hides her anorexia from her family so that the flannel-clad bad boy will sleep with her — and he does.
A more astute viewer might see that kind of lazy writing as stunningly misogynistic and offensive, but only if he or she takes the movie that seriously. Anyone else will probably just see it as stupid.
But remember that this is the guy who directed “Juno.” In the past, Reitman made hilarious studies of naively comfortable people set adrift and forced to question their questionable lives. “Thank You for Smoking” and “Up in the Air” understood uncertainty and imbalance, staying cynical but never too serious, with nuanced yet relatable characters facing real crises. It’s a total mystery why Reitman decided his talent is better off wasted on awful, vapid melodramas like “Labor Day” and now “Children.”
Either way, we’re stuck with it forever. What’s even more heartbreaking is that Reitman still hints that he knows what he’s doing. The tight framing the film tends to use isolates characters, interestingly enough. The sex scenes, contrastive episodes of “real” interaction against the tech baloney, come across as ugly and uncomfortable when the camera forces the viewer forward. Certain plotlines, though, such as the childlike and heartfelt romance between Tim’s dad and Hannah’s mom, lend a little optimism to counter them.
What does that make the takeaway, then? Are we losing the ability to connect with others save through a screen? Or does the Web free us to present our souls to the world as we see them, without the need for some mask of conformism?
“Children” doesn’t know, either. Everyone either learns their lesson or gives up trying, and then life goes on. (Cheerleader Allison even escapes death because of her malnutrition; anorexia saves her life.)
Then, at last, we come back to the pale blue dot and something clicks. Maybe Sagan had the answer all along: “Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.”
In the grandest scheme of things, none of this matters and the universe would not miss it for a second.
Joe covers Shrek the Musical for The Daily Free Press. He previously served as managing editor.
