Momma's Man

2008 movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Mikey (same guy who will eat anything in those Chex commercials, I think) has a job, a wife, and a baby back home in Los Angeles. For whatever reason, he doesn't want to be there and extends a visit with his parents and retreats back into his childhood. He stops answering his worried wife's calls, sits around reading his old comic books, throws a ball against the wall, thinks about walking down the stairs, decides against walking down the stairs, plays his guitar (poorly), refines old song lyrics, eventually tumbles down the stairs, eats, pretends to be doing work, and gets in touch with old friends and girlfriends. His parents, at first happy that he's around, begin to worry about him.

If this movie were a painting, you'd almost have to call it a still life. Mikey doesn't do much of anything. There's barely a narrative here. There are long periods of time without dialogue. There are scenes that go on long enough to aggravate the average viewer, and a lot of scenes that would make those average viewers ask, "Why the hell is that there?" This is a picture of ennui, a featherweight glacier, a slow-mo sketch of a mid-life crisis, and poor Mikey's a disembodied soul who has no idea what his next step should be. The film, as well as the non-acting of Matt Boren, is absorbing, however, and I couldn't help but empathize with Mikey even if I couldn't exactly identify with or completely understand him. There's not much flash in Azazel Jacobs' film. The cluttered and claustrophobic home fills the screen with lots of interesting things to look at, but I also thought it helped bring a focus, framing Mikey as this guy who feels trapped by forces that don't make sense, entombed in a silent turmoil. Director Jacobs has his own parents (according to the back of the dvd case) play Mikey's parents, and although neither of them can really act, they're both very likable and very real. The father looks like he could have wandered off the set of a David Lynch movie at times, especially in a scene where he shows his grown son a wind-up toy. And there's a really touching scene where the mother embraces Mikey, a scene that blurs into a flashback. But is it all entertaining? That's likely debatable. Fans of the dry humor of Jarmusch, Whisky, or Kaurismaki will likely enjoy, but it's definitely one of those types of movies that Shane typically likes where nothing really happens. I really love certain scenes in this one though--when Mikey "shaves"; when his friend, recently out of prison for unknown crimes, talks about how listening to the Indigo Girls in prison made him feel free and then sings one of their songs, a scene that could easily have been much shorter but at the same time was just about the perfect length; a scene where Mikey, in the middle of the night it seems, falls head-first down the steps and then gives a double thumbs-up to his parents when they emerge from the apartment to see what's wrong; the creepy neighbor in Los Angeles missing his backgammon partner; the parallel episodes with the wind-up toy and a shot of a trophy. Nice little movie that I probably wouldn't have bothered seeing if it didn't have "man" in the title. Speaking of the title, this does have a terrible one. Momma's Man? I could see Will Ferrell being in a movie called Momma's Man.