Solitary Man: No comfort for old salesmen

The title is ironic, though the movie itself at times seems to be not entirely aware of this, nonsensically launching its opening credit sequence with Johnny Cash’s rendition of the titular Neil Diamond ditty about a young man’s unease with cheating women, which is rather the opposite of what’s going on here. Six years after the mere mention of a potential heart problem prompted a late mid-life crisis and a catastrophic and very public personal meltdown, career car peddler Ben Kalmen (Michael Douglas) seems capable of just about anything other than being alone. He may have split from his wife Nancy (Susan Sarandon in a pretty thankless supporting role), but most nights he’s on the prowl for fresh flesh, preferably under 40, which according to Ben is the threshold beyond which the body “thickens.”

Not only do women support the sating of Ben’s carnal desires, or more to the point, his self-esteem, they also supply him with important business contacts—Ben’s heavily reliant on nepotism since being arrested for fraud. See, the problem isn’t so much that Ben has sex with the barely legal daughter (Imogen Poots, very good) of his rich girlfriend Jordan (Mary-Louise Parker), but that he was going out with the rich girlfriend in the first place. Jordan is only the most luscious embodiment—thickened or no—of Ben’s desperate cynicism in action. He’s using her, shamelessly. When push comes to shove comes to shit-kicking, which it will once that daughterly dalliance comes to light, it appears Ben will give up or sell-out just about anybody, including his adoring grandson, the subject of some emotional blackmail undertaken by Ben’s daughter, Susan (Jenna Fischer).

Solitary Man, which opens in Toronto tomorrow, was co-directed by journeyman scenarists Brian Koppelman and David Levien, who previously collaborated in this same capacity for 2001’s Knockaround Guys. I vaguely remember feeling some sympathy for that earlier picture despite its finally rather hackneyed ensemble crime caper premise, and that more or less lines up with my response to Solitary Man. I found myself rooting for the movie right to the end, enjoying certain audacious twists and its willingness to let its hero sink pretty low while ostensibly en route to redemption, and Douglas gives a beautifully modulated, unapologetic, and detailed performance. But Ben seems oblivious, his mind made up about what mercenary tactics one must engage in to succeed in life, which results in some fun, pretty crude, and not devoid of truth life lessons offered by Ben to gawky college sophomore Dan (Jesse Eisenberg). I think what ultimately makes Solitary Man less than satisfying is that it strives to embrace the virtues of friendship, family, and solidarity, yet, even in Nancy’s eleventh-hour offer of rescue from still greater disaster, the whole movie, like Ben, remains fundamentally solipsistic. Not a single character besides Ben emerges as anything more than a functionary.

Emotional Arithmetic: Impressive figures that don't quite add up

There’s this scene in Emotional Arithmetic that, like a handful of others, feels as though it was shaken loose from the film’s tight weave of pervading solemnity. It features two old guys getting up in the dead of night to raid the icebox for the congealed leftovers of what was previously a lavish meal. With their grub and a couple of bottles of 50, they hunker over a table and get down to work. Each man represents a disparate chapter in the history of a beguiling younger woman, and this unexpected wee-hours companionship is thus laced with a certain, amusingly masculine tension. What happens in this scene neither dissolves the tension entirely, not does it exactly resolve anything. It lingers briefly between the ostensibly important scenes. Interestingly, this scene lingers in my memory more vividly than anything else in the movie.

Awkwardly adapted from Matt Cohen’s Holocaust-related novel by screenwriter Jefferson Lewis and director Paolo Barzman, Emotional Arithmetic, with its godawful title, was never going to have an easy time proving itself a dynamic cinematic experience. It comes burdened with themes of loss, sacrifice, memory, and the at times crippling responsibility to the past. I say burdened not because these themes aren’t potent—on the contrary, the ideas Cohen’s addressed are rich and resonant—but because rather than coming to us through action, these themes are announced, lobbed about, mulled over.

What eases this burden considerably is the tremendous cast, five actors from four different countries with such accumulated experience as to evoke networks of emotion the moment they appear on screen together. Susan Sarandon plays Melanie, Gabriel Byrne plays Christopher, a pair linked by their time spent in the Drancy transit camp in occupied France as kids, and their being rescued from deportation to Auschwitz by Jakob, played by Max Von Sydow. The bulk of Emotional Arithmetic takes place four decades later, at Melanie’s rural home in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, where Melanie is now a mentally unstable middle-aged woman, wife to David, a much older history professor played by Christopher Plummer, and mother to Benjamin, a handsome, talented chef played by Roy Dupuis. The story as such concerns an unexpected reunion between Melanie, Christopher and Jakob, an event fraught with opposing ideas about how to memorialize victims of catastrophe and how to manage life’s loose ends and enduring desires.

There are moments where something happens, risks are taken, pent-up feelings are given expression—but these moments are nearly crowded out by scenes of stasis or contemplation—and it is not an active, nor an especially contagious contemplation. The rather gaudy, overwrought flashbacks to Drancy constitute only a fraction of the Emotional Arithmetic’s duration, but they somehow exemplify the overall weakness here, a tendency to make a case for the film’s seriousness by merely directing our attention toward events that we all know are overwhelmingly serious. The end result I suppose is a somewhat muddled meditation, a movie that doesn’t entirely work as a movie, but arguably fucntions as some modest catalyst for thought, and a rare opportunity to see actors of this caliber sharing the screen.