Men, Women & Children follows the story of a group of
high school teenagers and their parents as they attempt to navigate the many
ways the internet has changed their relationships, their communication, their
self-image, and their love lives. But
it’s very heavy-handed about it …
There are a lot of characters in this movie. Helen (Rosemarie DeWitt) and Don (Adam
Sandler) are stuck in a loveless marriage, and each of them is thinking about
having an affair. Don uses his son’s
computer to view internet porn. His son
has been addicted to internet porn since he was young, and he’s gotten so
desensitized to normal sexuality that his first sexual experience with a real
girl doesn’t go well.
Jennifer Garner plays Patricia, a mother who does nothing
but worry about who her daughter is chatting with online. She has nothing to worry about, but that
doesn’t stop her from monitoring everything her daughter does. Every night she logs into her daughter’s
computer and phone and reads every message and text. This becomes a problem when her daughter gets
a boyfriend, a nice guy named Tim. Tim
is addicted to online gaming and his mother recently split for LA. His newly single father Kent isn’t interested
in dating again until he meets Joan.
Joan Clint (Judy Greer) is obsessed with helping her
daughter Hannah become a celebrity. She
helps her by taking pictures of everything Hannah does and posting them to a
website. The website was originally
intended to be like an online resume for Hannah’s acting ambitions, but Joan
discovered that there’s money to be made in a “member’s only” section of the
website …
There’s also a girl who used to be fat but is skinny now,
and she’s determined to have her first kiss with the football player who made
fun of her last year.
There are some good stories here and I wasn’t bored watching
this movie. There were some cool effects
used to show everyone on their phones.
When we see a hallway full of students getting out of class, they’re all
on their phones. Above their heads, we
see the various screen shots of their text, facebook chats, and other
stuff. It’s a cool device to show how
each person is in their own little world instead of interacting with each
other.
Despite the good stuff, the movie falls flat. It feels like it’s trying to be too important
and profound. We know the dangers of
online dating and that we need to be aware of what our kids are doing
online. These are good themes for a
movie to explore, but I think this movie bites off more than it can chew. And the movie keeps cutting back to scenes of
the Voyager spacecraft exploring the solar system and referencing Pale Blue Dot
by Carl Sagan. Profound stuff but the
movie’s not that deep.
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