Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is here in Boston, but his heart is in Utah as he remotely covers the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. This year’s Sundance is a virtual edition, but that’s not stopping the film premieres from flowing. Check out our official Sundance preview, scan through all our Sundance 2022 reviews as they are published, and check out our full archives of past festivals.
If there’s one truly risk-insulated gamble that a meme studio like A24 likes to take, it’s when an actor wants to become a director and needs someone to lay all their chips down on the table for them. Five times out of 10, you’ll wind up with something passable that will grip a news cycle for a few days before fading out of view (Eighth Grade, or Mid90s, which was much better than its reception), a few times you’ll get a genuine cultural phenomenon (an entire generation of teenagers now wear “Greta Gerwig” shirts on first dates to their local art houses), and every once in a while, you get something truly terrible that will at least bring in some receipts from morbid curiosity. A24’s been mostly insulated from the consequences of this kind of failure, but Jesse Eisenberg’s here to change all of that with his directorial debut, a family dramedy entitled When You Finish Saving the World, which is the kind of film that I am just nearly guaranteed to dislike. So if this makes you want to write off this review with a scoff because I Just Don’t Get What He’s Going For or whatever, that’s totally fine, but you come to cinematic battle with the critic you have, not the one you want, and this one could not stand this movie.
Adapted by Eisenberg from his story of the same name, When You Finish Saving the World takes us inside the relationship between Jackie (Julianne Moore), a progressively-minded former activist who is as magnanimous with her work — she runs a women’s shelter — as she is a jerk to those closest to her, and Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard), her teenaged son, who is a reasonably successful streamer, broadcasting his cute little folk-punk tracks across the internet for plenty of adoring fans. He, too, is kind of a jerk: He’s got a big head from all this success, naturally offset by the fact that he’s too shy to own up to the fact that he’s talented, and like The Fresh Prince and Jazz said back in the day, his parents just don’t understand. The two constantly butt heads, but, in a roundabout way, they find themselves attracted to a pair of individuals who can provide for them what they want so desperately from their blood relations. Jackie sees an ideal version of her son in Kyle (Billy Bryk), a kid staying with his mother in her shelter, who is kind, protective of his mother, and doesn’t have to be told twice to help out with a chore; and Ziggy finds a fire-brand version of his mother in a classmate, a socialist slam poet named Lila (Alisha Boe), whose affections might mean that he could have “purpose” and be taken “seriously” or whatever. Of course, both of them take it too far and fuck up, but that’s to be expected.
Like a lot of actors-turned-directors, Eisenberg errs too heavily on the side of imitating his formative influences, chief amongst them being Noah Baumbach, who gave Eisenberg his true big break in The Squid and the Whale almost 15 years ago. Formally, it’s the same sort of Super 16 gloss that suggests “indie” in the minds of so many, and while it happens to look “nice” thanks to the sheen that proper film grain provides, it’s staged flatly and drably dressed, like a Chris Ware cartoon without his kaleidoscopic sense of design and color to set it apart. Thematically, it’s similarly naval-gazing and slight in its attempts to skim the psychologies of its warring mother-and-son duo, and though their emotional oedipal attractions to their respective counterparts are meant to shake up that formula, well, it doesn’t work. The characters are so deeply unempathetic in their portrayal — Moore is genuinely ugly to her child to the point of being verbally abusive to him, and the blowhardy and narcissistic antics of Wolfhard’s character, while meant to be funny, are just kind of exhausting — that it would require a ton of grace for the average audience member to level out the scales with the amount of pity that Eisenberg hopes we’ll have for them and their plight. Sure, the director seems to say, they might be assholes, but they’re assholes who are suffering in their own right, but he also seems to forget that a bunch of assholes are going to be watching this and are most likely sensitive to having their time wasted on the problems of milquetoast liberal-minded assholes in Indiana.