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'Men, Women & Children' ensemble cast looks at Internet disconnection [Daily News, Los Angeles](Daily News (Los Angeles, CA) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Oct. 01--"Men, Women & Children" certainly seems like another one of those Jason Reitman movies that address how we live now -- and it is. But the director of "Juno" and "Up in the Air" says that's not the film's sole, or even primary, purpose. "I loved the book," says Reitman of the novel written by Chad Kultgen that the movie is adapted from. "I thought it was a really interesting portrait of a group of people, their desires and their secrets. The location happened to be the Internet." Reitman contends it was all really coincidental. "I made a movie that dealt with teenage pregnancy and I made a movie that dealt with the recession. Each time, only upon finishing it would I stop and realize that people presumed that I zeroed in on some sort of modern social issue, when really I used that background simply as a location," he says. Set in Austin, Texas, "Men, Women & Children" is an ensemble piece about a variety of troubled people who get in more trouble on the Web. Rosemarie DeWitt and Adam Sandler play a long-married couple, Helen and Don Truby, who covertly seek action outside of their loveless marriage -- he through an online escort service and she via the Ashley Madison extramarital affairs website. Their son Chris ("Boardwalk Empire's" Travis Tope) is a high school football player who has long been addicted to Internet porn. When provocative cheerleader Hannah (Olivia Crocicchia) decides that he's the one to take her virginity, bedroom farce and tragedy ensue. Hannah's mom Joan (Judy Greer), a frustrated actress, enables her daughter's dreams of stardom by maintaining a subscription website of Hannah's photos and videos, some of which may not be what you'd call appropriate. Joan meets Kent Mooney (Dean Norris from "Breaking Bad" and "Under the Dome"), whose wife ran off with her lover. The single parents hit it off, but Kent is worried about his son Tim (Ansel Elgort from "The Fault in Our Stars"), the high school's star quarterback who has quit the team and spends most of his time playing an online fantasy game. Advertisement Tim does, however, manage to establish a healthy relationship with classmate Brandy Beltmeyer ("Last Man Standing's" Kaitlyn Dever). That relationship is threatened by Brandy's overprotective mother Patricia (Jennifer Garner), who monitors her children's every social media move. She's sometimes a comic figure, even to some of the other parents. "I have no desire to make cautionary tales," Reitman says. "I really don't think of the Internet that way. It's a fascinating tool that arrived at our feet fully formed, and we just don't seem quite prepared for it. "The Internet didn't really arrive with any instructions," the director, who co-wrote the script with Erin Cressida Wilson, continues. "It's just this curiosity box that is spinning us out, and we don't know how to give rules to our kids yet. It's not like saying, 'You can't stay out after midnight,' or watch certain TV shows or go over the tracks to the bad part of town. There's no way to tell a kid 'Go to this URL, but don't go to the other one.' " Although her and Sandler's characters are too wrapped up in their own dysfunctions to care about their son's, DeWitt's default response to the material echoes other castmembers' who are parents. "I think it will scare you if you have children," she says. "I don't know, mine's 16 months old. But you used to talk to your kids about the birds and the bees, now it's be careful what you type on the Google line because it could change your life forever." Norris, the father of five, is equally concerned. "On the Internet there's all this availability of private stuff that I, certainly, didn't have when growing up," Norris says. "It's a real generational change. If I wanted to watch porn, I couldn't until I was in college, because there was a family TV with a VCR. Even if I got hold of a porn tape, what was I going to do? Stick it into the VCR with the family around? "Now, every little device, if it's connected to the Internet, is a potential portal. That easy accessibility is a qualitative difference. And there really is that concept of, you've seen so much of it that when you get a real girlfriend at age 15, you're like 'Whoa, this is not quite the same.' " Perhaps representing his generation's lifelong familiarity with the Internet, Elgort has a moderated view of the film and its subject. "It's sort of a dark comedy about social media and the way it's affecting the world and relationships," the 20-year-old actor says. Reitman revealed that the generation gap became evident during production. "We shot December-January, and December was all teenagers and January was all adults," the director recalls. "It was funny because you could almost feel the difference on set. In December it was all open experimentation, and in January it was all people being devious and crossing the lines. "A lot of the cast members who were teenagers said they understood why the previous generation is nervous," Reitman reports. "But they said that there's something about knowing that they have access to everything that makes them not need to go check it out. That was a really interesting point, as opposed to feeling like you can't have it and you have to go find it somewhere." Reitman, 36, admits he tries not to be too worried about his own 8-year-old daughter's inevitable cyberspace life. "We have to be honest with ourselves: Our children are going to go online," he says. "They're curious creatures, they don't want to look stupid amongst their friends and they don't want to ask their parents about touchy subjects. But I want my daughter to have a childhood, and I want her to hold onto her innocence for as long as possible. "Again, I'm among that first generation of parents who have no idea how to do this. I imagine it's like being the first generation of parents once cars were everywhere. All of a sudden, your kids can jump in a car and drive wherever they want. I'm not the guy that says that rock 'n' roll is the devil. I want to have an open conversation and be engaged with my daughter, but at the same time, I look at the Jennifer Garner character and I think she's not completely insane." For grown-up filmmakers, though, there's nothing like a location where anything can happen and everything does. "The Internet is a place where we open up," Reitman observes. "We're most honest, surprisingly, in our relationship with the Internet more often than we are with the people around us. It's not coaxing us to be worse people, but it is bringing a lot out of us -- the good and the bad." ___ (c)2014 the Daily News (Los Angeles) Visit the Daily News (Los Angeles) at www.dailynews.com Distributed by MCT Information Services |