As seen at the 2008 Los Angeles Film
Festival:
Azazel Jacobs’ Momma’s Man
tackles perhaps one of the oddest subjects that a sparse
examination of the hurdles faced by the human psyche ever has:
the young man who can’t seem to leave his parents’ home. Make no
mistake, though: this ain’t your average story about a momma’s
boy who has to overcome his fears of separation before leaving
the nest for college. In fact, it’s just the opposite, as the
title suggests: the protagonist is Mikey (Matt Boren), a
thirtysomething-year-old man with a wife and kid. When the
viewer first meets Mikey, he has returned to his parents’
Manhattan apartment, supposedly on a business trip from his
resident California for a short stay. Days turn into weeks,
however, and Mikey can’t find it in himself to leave, meeting up
with old friends as his family and job begin to waste away
without him. All the while, he makes excuses for his extended
stay, which his tolerant father (Ken Jacobs) and over-attached
mother (Flo Jacobs)—both in their seventies, mind you—buy until
his abandoned wife becomes so desperate she calls them in a
rattled state of confusion.
If the above
sounds like a tedious cinematic exercise that goes absolutely
nowhere to you, then you’re probably reacting in a rational
manner. Jacobs’ screenplay for Momma’s Man likely reeked
of indie-filmmaker angst and self-indulgence on paper. But the
material transformed in its execution. Anchored by a realistic
and painstakingly authentic performance by lead Boren, the movie
feels entirely realistic. As Mikey comes to pathologically lie
about his reasons for staying in New York, neglecting his
home-life and clinging to his mother’s over-accommodating
attitude, the experience is immersive and wrenching. I believed
in the character and in this very belief I forged a connection
with him. Yes, he might be too exaggerated in his internal
desperation to identify with and, yes, he might be too much of
an idiot to respect, but he earns the viewer’s sympathy
nonetheless. Here’s a guy who is suffering from the
circumstances of his life and, while he can’t seem to do
anything right, it’s evident that he’s smart enough to overcome
the reality before him by the picture’s end. Perhaps this very
realization is what lends to the empathy he is able to evoke, or
perhaps it’s merely the skill that actor Boren exhibits in being
able to provide such a realization from a character that is
defined almost exclusively by facial expressions and Jacobs’
sparsely (and smartly) written dialogue.
The fact that
Momma’s Man and its protagonist ring so true seems
especially remarkable when one considers Jacobs’ motives for
creating them. In the Q&A that followed the Los Angeles Film
Festival screening of the film I attended, Jacobs extensively
discussed the fact that one of his main considerations when
writing the script was to use the story as a means to document
his childhood apartment home. The apartment, which his parents
(who play Mikey’s mom and dad in the movie) still live in, is
built upon mounds and mounds of old junk. The walls are
literally made of piles and racks of clothes and toys and files
and papers and books. The way the place functions as a living,
breathing supporting character in the movie is something of a
marvel: furthering Mikey’s inability to leave home is the fact
that the memories of his youth surround him. In one eerily
memorable scene, his mother uses a wire to pull down a
ceiling-hoisted PVC-pipe rack on which his childhood clothes
hang. Jacobs clearly built his story around a setting – not the
other way around. In this very method of creation, the budding
filmmaker achieved a thoroughly innovative product, one that
bends the traditional rules of cinema in all the ways that a
good film should. Dry and existential as its premise may sound
when synopsized, Momma’s Man actually proves quite the
involving motion picture.
-Danny Baldwin, Bucket Reviews
Review Published on: 6.29.2008
Screened on: 6.21.2008 at the
Landmark in West Los Angeles, CA.
