A Best Picture Oscar nomination for a film with Adam Sandler? This looks like a very strong possibility for Jason Reitman’s powerfully dramatic “Men, Women and Children,” which had its world premiere Saturday night at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Reitman’s darkly comic, sexually charged drama is Hollywood’s most devastating look at suburban ennui and sexual mores since “American Beauty,” which premiered in Toronto on its way to a Best Picture win back in 1999. But Sandler doesn’t dominate the film the way Kevin Spacey did “American Beauty” — he’s a member of a large, impressive ensemble playing parents and adolescents navigating sex and relationships in ways that would have been unimaginable just 15 years ago before the Internet began dominating our lives.
Sandler dials it way down in a self-effacing turn as an Austin, Texas, dad whose addiction to porn on the Web has taken a heavy toll on his marriage to the wonderful Rosemary Dewitt. Out of desperation and boredom, she signs up with the Ashley Madison website for a discreet sexual encounter with a nice married man (Dennis Haysbert) — even as hubby Sandler hires an $800-an-hour escort to fulfill his needs.
Their high school quarterback son (Travis Trope) is so far gone down the rabbit hole of Internet porn that he’s physically unable to honor the request of a cheerleader (Olivia Crocicchia) to relieve her of her virginity. The cheerleader’s single mother (an outstanding Judy Greer) is a failed actress with vicarious ambitions for her daughter to win a competition to be “America’s Next Big Celebrity.” But Mom’s ambitions have warped her judgment, particularly when it comes to the racy website she’s put together for her daughter.
Greer bonds with a single dad (Dean Norris of “Breaking Bad”) whose ex-wife is broadcasting her plans to remarry on Facebook, much to the anguish of his already depressed son (Ansel Elgort of “Fault in Our Stars”), who has quit the football team and devotes most of his time to escaping into a fantasy world in an online multi-player fantasy game.
He reaches out to a classmate (Kaitlyn Dever) with a hyper-vigilant mother (Jennifer Garner), who devotes prodigious efforts to monitor all of her daughter’s electronic interactions. She can’t, of course, and a series of text messages lead to a near-tragedy.
What elevates “Men, Women and Children” considerably above a dramatized lecture on the perils of the Internet is the consistently high caliber of acting (including, yes, Sandler and the spot-on narration by Emma Thompson) and an uncommonly perceptive script by Reitman and Erin Cressida Wilson (“Secretary”) that isn’t afraid to go to some very dark places.
As he demonstrated with “Juno” and “Up in the Air,” Reitman has an uncanny knack among contemporary directors for tapping into the zeitgeist in dramatically satisfying ways. Both of those films received Best Picture nominations from the academy, and I’d expect “Men, Women and Children” will follow suit, with DeWitt and Greer the most likely acting nominees.
Paramount is trying to get a jump on the awards season by beginning to roll this one out with a limited release on Oct. 1 before going wide on Oct. 17.