"Solitary Man"

Okay, so right now I’m oblig­ated to put my money, such as it is, where my eth­ic­al mouth is, as I’m gonna write some very com­pli­ment­ary things about a movie made by a couple of friends of mine.  I don’t think it’s a secret to any­one who’s fol­lowed my work over the years that I’ve been bud­dies with Brian Koppelman and David Levien since I met them on the set of their first pro­duced film as screen­writers, Rounders, back in 1998. And I hope I’m not being too…is “obsequious” the word?…when I fur­ther point out that Brian and David have been/are not just film-world friends but, you know, very real, very con­stant, almost-get-you-out-of-jail friends. Literally, even. (It’s a long story. Short Bart Simpson ver­sion: “I did­n’t do it!” No, really.) Furthermore, I’ve got an intim­acy with their new film, Solitary Man, that few crit­ics have the priv­ilege of enjoy­ing; I’ve read the script (some­thing I actu­ally make a prac­tice of not doing most of the time, I believe I turned against it after a trau­mat­ic exper­i­ence with an Ehren Kruger work about ten years ago) and seen three dif­fer­ent cuts of the film, includ­ing the final. Which I think is splen­did. Putting aside my per­son­al con­flicts as much as it is pos­sible, I hereby pro­claim that Solitary Man, which opens Friday in Los Angeles and New York, is a ter­rif­ic character-driven drama (with com­edy) of the ilk that many com­plain is not made any­more, and that if you are one of said com­plain­ers, you ought to take my advice and check this pic­ture out, because you will be very taken with it.

Michael Douglas scores what I con­sider a latter-day career high with his per­form­ance as Ben Kalmen, a one-time mon­ster car deal­er who’s fallen into both dis­rep­ute and fisc­al may­hem in the wake of a post-midlife decision to pretty much say “fuck it” to whatever once meant any­thing to him. He now spends his days, as his daugh­ter Susan (Jenna Fisher, in as sly and seem­ingly self-effacing a turn as her Pam in the TV series The Office) so mem­or­ably puts it, “slut­ting up Lexington Avenue,” prey­ing on the loc­al cou­gars, as it were, and try­ing to get a new busi­ness con­cern going. Central to that con­cern’s star­tup is the influ­ence of his woozy, stink­ing rich girl­friend Jordan (Mary Louise Parker), whose you-can’t-tell-me pre­co­cious daugh­ter Allyson (Imogene Poots) is apply­ing to Ben’s alma mater, whose lib­rary he endowed. Ben’s palaver to Allyson about relationships-as-transactions, laid out over drinks dur­ing a week­end jaunt to that col­lege (where Ben also recon­nects with an old buddy played by Danny DeVito, and prof­fers crass but use­ful social life advice to a green stu­dent played by Jesse Eisenberg) res­ults in what you’d call a griev­ously ill-advised liais­on for the two, and if you thought Ben’s life was a bit of a mess before the fal­lout from this, um, trans­ac­tion, well, he’s got farther to fall. And maybe some­place to rise up to. 

Kalmen’s really a movie char­ac­ter for the ages, an unc­tu­ously charm­ing slimeball who may have a heart of…well, not neces­sar­ily gold, but at least some­thing not mani­festly tox­ic, under his slick exter­i­or. If you wanna talk about him in terms of ’70s movies, pitch him some­where between Jack Lemmon’s Harry Stoner in Avildsen’s Save the Tiger (1973) and Roy Scheider’s Joe Gideon in Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979). He’s also got a coarse swag­ger that one asso­ci­ates with some of the anti-heroes of David Mamet, one of Brian’s favor­ite writers. (While Koppelman and Levien co-directed the film, Solitary Man dif­fers from their pri­or pro­jects in that it’s from a solo script by Brian.) But finally he is his own man, a thor­oughly recog­niz­able type even if you don’t know the Manhattan milieus through which he ima­gines he’s still cut­ting a for­mid­able swath (and the moods and mores of which the film­makers cap­ture with beau­ti­ful, accur­ate, effi­cient short­hand). Even if you feel dis­gus­ted by the very ground he’s walk­ing on, Koppelman and Levien make you feel some­how inves­ted in his fate. 

The film’s look has a lot of clean lines and a good, intim­ate feel to it; the cine­ma­to­graph­er was Alwin Kuchlar, who also shot, among oth­er pic­tures, a stone favor­ite of mine, Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar. The pic­ture is bril­liantly cast down to the tini­est parts—Susan Sarandon is warmly Sarandonesque as Ben’s exas­per­ated but still affec­tion­ate ex-wife; Ben Shenkman’s beau­ti­ful as a would-be Kalmen back­er who has to tell the deal­er no; Richard Schiff has a dev­ast­at­ing bit as a private banker who deliv­ers some unwel­come news to Ben; an uncred­ited Olivia Thirlby is enchant­ing as the bright girl­friend of Eisenberg’s char­ac­ter, and so it goes on. 

The fel­lows’ dir­ect­ori­al debut, 2001’s Knockaround Guys, had a nifty premise and an appeal­ing cast, but its was fre­quently indis­tinct and less than sure-footed. Here the dir­ect­ing team has cre­ated not only a fully-realized movie, but a fully real­ized Koppelman/Levien movie—the kind of pic­ture they were meant to make, the kind of pic­ture that they got into the game to make in the first place. And I know it was­n’t all that easy—some day, if I ever get to teach a class in edit­ing, I’ll bring them in to explain how they were able to improve the movie by a very large per­cent by merely excising a bit of data at the very end, and how fraught their decision to do so seemed to one of them until it was actu­ally executed—but they really pulled it off. Good for them, and good for you, I think.