Toronto Film Festival: Men, Women & Children - film review: Adam Sandler plays it straight but is still funny in this drama examining the effect of online porn

Jason Reitman's movie about how the internet has changed our sex lives presents us with half a dozen 15-year-old high school students, all having internet-related problems with sex and intimacy
Fresh discovery: Ansel Elgort and Kaitlyn Dever in Men, Women & Children
David Sexton8 September 2014

Toronto's local hero Jason Reitman fell on his face at this festival last year, with his pulpy vehicle for Kate Winslet, Labor Day, in which an escaped convict lovingly kneaded her lonely crust. Men, Women & Children had a much sparkier premiere this weekend in the city's Ryerson Theatre.

As Reitman cheerily announced before it began, this movie is about how the internet has changed our sex lives. Tactfully adapted from Chad Kultgen's highly explicit 2011 novel of the same name, it's set in prosperous Austin, Texas and presents us with half a dozen 15-year-old high school students, all having internet-related problems with sex and intimacy – and their parents are doing no better. Although token connections are made between the characters, it's not really a unified drama, so much as a carefully spread out series of case studies, unfolding in parallel.

There's anorexic cheerleader Allison (Elenea Kampouris) who visits sites encouraging self-starvation and has such low self-esteem she loses her virginity to a crass jock, with catastrophic consequences. There's pretty Hannah Clint (Olivia Crocicchia), celebrity-obsessed, who is daftly encouraged by her failed-actress, single-parent mother (Judy Greer) to create her own website of paedophile glamour shots, including putting on special sessions for paying clients.

On the other end of the spectrum, a comparatively well-balanced girl, Brandy (Kaitlyn Dever), has all her social network activity insanely monitored by her mother Patricia (Jennifer Garner), who believes that she is protecting her daughter from harm, to the extent of deleting any friendly messages from boys before she gets them. Patricia has founded her own crazy self-help group, PATI, Parents Against The Internet. Poor Brandy is forced into secrecy.

Among the boys, handsome Tim (Ansel Elgort) is the high school's football star but, depressed after his parents' divorce, he's decided that life on earth is meaningless, seen from a cosmological perspective. Giving up on sport, he's retreated into obsessively playing an online fantasy game called Guild Wars. And another football player, Chris Truby (Travis Tope), a nice boy with no actual sexual experience, has become so hooked on the extreme dominance porn he finds online that when he gets into bed with Hannah he can't cope with normal sex.

Meanwhile, Chris's parents are in deep trouble of their own, having ceased to attract one another as they enter middle age. Don Truby (Adam Sandler, acting serious, still funny) has long been an enthusiastic porn user but now he moves up to hiring carefully specified online escorts at $800 a time. For her part, his wife (Rosemarie DeWitt) is using another website to meet strangers in hotel rooms for sex too, starting with a gravel-voiced black man (Dennis Haysbert) whose pseudonym is "Secretluvur".

It's all a mess and it just keeps carrying on. However perkily filmed and well-acted, Men, Women & Children is a soap and might as well be a TV series. It might yet be a TV series.

Reitman has probably rightly chosen to make it verbally explicit but visually chaste, so as not to be open to the accusation of being exploitative itself. There's no nudity, no sex actually depicted. In this it discards the USP of Kultgen's novel, which describes the sex-lives of teenagers who have grown up with hardcore porn being readily accessible online with all the enthusiasm of a fresh discovery – and perhaps no little prurience.

Reitman has cut all that out, including a key scene in which sympathetic kids find themselves having sex that neither of them actually wants – although to his credit he has also reduced the American football component drastically too. Instead, he has given the film a didactic narrator, telling us facts about sex, the internet and the universe, voiced with haughty school-marmishness by Emma Thompson: enough to put anybody off everything for ever.

Men, Women & Children is the latest film to try to find some visual representation of the new omnipresence of social media, also attempted in films as various as Lucy (lasers shooting up to satellites), The Fifth Estate (sliding screens and good old-fashioned laptop porterage) and Transcendence (entire world meltily electrified). Here Reitman has resorted to good old thought bubbles floating above the heads of the high school students as they mill around, supplemented by surtitles for emails, texts and instant messaging. There's no convention in place yet in the movies for portraying this ever more dominant form of communication: if one ever arises, all these early efforts will instantly look laughable.

Men, Women & Children isn't as knowing about this new world as it would like to be. It's mildly entertaining, no more – and it leaves Up in the Air looking ever more a credit to George Clooney, rather than its director.

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