If Best Picture Oscar winners “American Beauty’’ and “Crash’’ had a millennial baby, it would probably look a lot like Jason Reitman’s “Men, Women & Children,’’ a darkly comic, sexually charged drama about suburban ennui in the age of iPhones and iPads.
Adam Sandler, of all people, gets top billing, but he doesn’t dominate the proceedings the way Kevin Spacey so brilliantly did in “American Beauty” — he’s a member of a large, impressive ensemble playing parents and their adolescent offspring navigating sex and relationships in ways that would have been unimaginably scary just 15 years ago.
A paunchy, bearded Sandler dials it way down in a self-effacing turn as Don, an Austin, Texas, dad whose addiction to porn on the Web has taken a heavy toll on his marriage to his long-suffering wife, Helen (the wonderful Rosemarie DeWitt).
Out of desperation and boredom, Helen signs up with the Ashley Madison website for a discreet sexual encounter with a nice married man (Dennis Haysbert) — even as her hubby recruits an $800-an-hour escort from another Internet vendor to fulfill his manly fantasies.
Their high school quarterback son (Travis Tope) is so far gone down the rabbit hole of Internet porn that he’s physically unable to honor the request of cheerleader Hannah (Olivia Crocicchia) to relieve her of virginity.
Hannah’s single mother, Donna (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 seriously warped her judgment, particularly when it comes to the racy website she’s put together for her daughter.
Donna bonds with single dad Kent (Dean Norris of “Breaking Bad”), a jock whose ex-wife is broadcasting her plans to remarry on Facebook. That’s created much anguish for Kent’s son, Tim (Ansel Elgort of “The Fault in Our Stars”), who has quit the football team and devotes most of his time to popping antidepressants and escaping into a fantasy world in an online multiplayer fantasy game.
Tim reaches out to a classmate, Brandy (Kaitlyn Dever) — herself miserable because her hypervigilant single mother, Patricia (Jennifer Garner), devotes every waking hour to monitoring all of her daughter’s electronic interactions. She can’t, of course, and a well-meaning attempt at intervention via text messages makes things even worse.
What elevates “Men, Women & Children” considerably above a dramatized (and occasionally over-dramatized) lecture on the dehumanizing aspects of the Internet is the consistently high caliber of acting (including, yes, Sandler) and spot-on narration by Emma Thompson. The uncommonly perceptive script by Reitman and Erin Cressida Wilson (“Secretary”) — adapted from a novel by Chad Kultgen — 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. Still, this film is more likely to resonate with those old enough to remember when our lives didn’t revolve around the Internet than with jaded millennials, who may shrug off some of the casual cruelty on display here.