One man's mid-life crisis makes for another man's really boring movie.
The particular mid-life crisis in question belongs to Ben, played by Michael Douglas in a pretty decent performance undermined by a pretty lame movie. In "Solitary Man," we see Ben be a jerk in just about every conceivable way, preying on girls 40 years younger than him, giving impressionable college guys lousy advice about women, neglecting his grandson, telling his daughter graphic stories of his sexual exploits and having cozy chats with his ex-wife (Susan Sarandon), who seems grudgingly tolerant of him and his bad-boy nature. This goes on for 90 minutes until a last-minute soliloquy that lands with an expositional thud informs us that this behavior and its aftermath, though the movie has made it seem like the work of a lifetime, has only been going on for six and a half(!) years, since Ben was diagnosed with a heart irregularity that he has taken great pains to neglect. Suddenly, a film that up to then has been going nowhere no longer even makes a lot of sense, and any last shred of interest I had in the film vanished like a puff of smoke.
The moral of this story is: treat everyone in your life like crap and die lonely. Wow, what a revelation that is.
Grade: C-
The particular mid-life crisis in question belongs to Ben, played by Michael Douglas in a pretty decent performance undermined by a pretty lame movie. In "Solitary Man," we see Ben be a jerk in just about every conceivable way, preying on girls 40 years younger than him, giving impressionable college guys lousy advice about women, neglecting his grandson, telling his daughter graphic stories of his sexual exploits and having cozy chats with his ex-wife (Susan Sarandon), who seems grudgingly tolerant of him and his bad-boy nature. This goes on for 90 minutes until a last-minute soliloquy that lands with an expositional thud informs us that this behavior and its aftermath, though the movie has made it seem like the work of a lifetime, has only been going on for six and a half(!) years, since Ben was diagnosed with a heart irregularity that he has taken great pains to neglect. Suddenly, a film that up to then has been going nowhere no longer even makes a lot of sense, and any last shred of interest I had in the film vanished like a puff of smoke.
The moral of this story is: treat everyone in your life like crap and die lonely. Wow, what a revelation that is.
Grade: C-