Why are adult men in movies so often infantilized? Maybe the better question is why are men in our society so often infantilized, but since this is a movie review, I’ll stick to the focus on men in media.
Men in movies (and TV and commercials) so often come across as bumbling idiots, helpless husbands, clueless fathers, chumps and schmucks and putzes, self-centered narcissists, men who flit from woman to woman, casting their trail of sperm and accumulated children to the four winds and multiple mothers, manchildren who have become pop culture-addicted Peter Pans, men who retreat to their video games, sci-fi superheroes, electronic game apps, 50-inch screens for streaming binge-dumps, dumbed-down sequels and sports hoo-ha, even adult males with arrested development in love with My Little Pony cartoon series who attend Brony conventions in costume. (Full disclosure: I wear Sponge Bob socks and a Bart Simpson T-shirt, but my geekdom stops there.)
And can someone please tell me why women fall for these goofballs?
Then maybe I can understand the appeal that Duncan (Chris O’Dowd) and Tucker (Ethan Hawke) hold for Annie (Rose Byrne) in Juliet, Naked. This film, directed by Jesse Peretz, is marketed as an indie rom-com, a comic look at life’s second chances, filled with quirky characters and unconventional romance. But I kept getting pissed off at the immaturity and infantile silliness of the two men and their selfish, little-boy messes — and just as exasperated with the woman who puts up with this nonsense.
This time it’s a script based on a Nick Hornby novel of the same title, adapted by multiple writers (Evgenia Peretz, Jim Taylor, Tamara Jenkins), so you can expect it to go off in many convoluted, tangled directions. It’s the story of long-suffering Annie in a coastal English town whose long term live-in boyfriend Duncan has a fanboy fetish for the American singer-songwriter Tucker Crowe. Seems that Tucker performed his last concert in Minneapolis in the early ’90s, then pulled a J.D. Salinger on his groupies, abandoning his cult following and going off the grid to lick his unidentified wounds. Duncan deconstructs every lyric and album cover for clues to Tucker’s genius and disappearance, going so far as to devote a room (temple, shrine, mausoleum) at home to Crowe memorabilia. As evidence of his combo of intellect and pop culture, Duncan also teaches a college course on “American Cinema and the Alienated Male.”
Spoiler alert: both Duncan and Tucker are alienated males, and it’s up to Annie to redeem them both. This is always the woman’s role — in cinema and in life — don’t you know?
Sorry, but more of my prissy peevishness for a moment — can you tell me why so many films that feature college literature instructors, inevitably male, have them bloviating at length with starry-eyed students, inevitably female, who are then swept away by his pedagogical strut in the classroom, leading to the predictable cocksman’s swagger in her bedroom? Though what once was mansplained with “many girls matriculate knowing that if the professorial lamp is properly rubbed, the phallic genie will pop out” (famously observed by Brown University English professor Verlin Cassill, editor of the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, as he lamented the new restrictions on faculty-student copulation), it’s a tiresome trope, less and less defensible, even among consenting adults, in this day and age of accountability and acknowledged power inequity between teacher and student.
Duncan writes an obsessive blog for all things Crowe-centric and parses a recently bootlegged copy of the original demo recording of Tucker’s long-ago breakup album Juliet. Annie gets tired of the nonstop pontification and responds to the blog post with an anonymous review of her own, lacerating the limp lyrics and pedestrian performance. Lo and behold, the man himself, Tucker Crowe, comes out of hiding to praise Annie’s insightful commentary. Mohammed has come to the mountain when Tucker Crowe himself comes to the blog, then after an extended transatlantic email narrative between the two, unbeknownst to Duncan, Crowe comes from America to England to dazzle Annie, confound Duncan, and perhaps redeem — there’s that word again — himself to his own family, including five children from four relationships.
There are some winning moments in this occasionally whimsical film, but it falls short of the advertised winsomeness. It’s a lot to ask for a rom-com that really just wants to be a rocker movie with a sellable soundtrack. Yes, over the course of the film, the movie recreates the entire legendary album, and Ethan Hawke sings the Juliet songs with the Tucker Crowe band, going from tender croon to banshee wail.
If you can just get over the men’s immaturity, the three leads are likable enough, especially Byrne’s character, who exudes innocence and heartbreak. Her own desperation is revealed when she must empty her vibrator of batteries so her boyfriend can go off alone with headphones and operate his CD player. But her character seems more long-suffering than truly multidimensional, like the men are allowed to be. Whatever charm the film exudes comes from Annie, so you want more of her and less of these two manchildren she’s stuck with.
When the hero becomes the rival, the sweet ridiculousness of the movie farce really kicks in. O’Dowd as Duncan is a master of the double-take when he meets his hero and has to compare his golden boy to the scruffy, pot-bellied reality. I was reminded of the scene in Annie Hall when Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer is in line at the movies, spouting off on Marshall McLuhan’s notion that the medium is the message, when McLuhan himself steps out of the queue to set the record straight. There’s a delicious scene with the threesome at dinner where Duncan can finally bask in the glow of his idol Tucker, but the idol is quite dismissive of the worshipper’s adoration. This ticks off Duncan, who screams, “Art isn’t for the artist any more than water is for the bloody plumber.” Later, Tucker, who has spent most of his life avoiding responsibility to wives and offspring, suddenly is confronted by them all in a hospital room like something right out of a Marx Brothers comedy, a clever set piece of screwball comic timing. And as for Ethan Hawke, it’s obvious this actor can do anything. As Annie and Tucker connect via email, each revealing their discontented and disconnected lives to one another, Hawke conveys both the zest and insouciance of youth and a very frumped middle age.
Who are you pulling for here, the geek or the goof? I just wish she’d had more grit in making her choice. Me, I’d ditch them both. She’s smart, beautiful, spirited and by end of the film lives in vibrant, dynamic London. Surely, there are many more eligible choices there. But for the time being, between Tucker and Duncan, she’d be better off just retrieving the batteries. Mansplain that, would you?
Ben Wiley taught literature and film at St. Petersburg College. At USF/Tampa, he was statewide Director of the Florida Consortium/University of Cambridge (UK) International Summer Schools. His interests are film, theater, books, and kayaking Florida rivers. He also writes the BookStories feature in Creative Loafing Tampa. Contact him here.
This article appears in Aug 23-30, 2018.
