Momma’s Man

[October 22nd, 2008]

Yes, you can go home again. Caveat visitor: You might not want to leave. Consider Mikey, the sad-sack protagonist of Azazel Jacobs’ wonderful, low-budget drama Momma’s Man. Unlike the reluctant grown-ups who backpedal into the nest in films like The Royal Tenenbaums, Garden State, Spanking the Monkey and The Graduate, Mikey doesn’t have a pinpoint-able problem—no guiding light of Freudian trauma or repression here—and he doesn’t move back home so much as go for a weekend visit and decide to stay.

So, what’s his damage? Why this refusal to leave that eventually becomes a surreal and agoraphobic inability to leave? His parents, played by renowned experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs and painter Flo Jacobs—Azazel’s real-life folks and owners of the loft apartment in which most of the film takes place—are sweet and solicitous. He has a pretty wife and a new baby girl back home in L.A., as well as a job that’s important enough that the more extended his vacation, the deeper the shit he is in. But he lets the subway train taking him to the airport carry him right back to Mom and Dad.

Mikey exhausts the queasy thrill of rooting through his old stuff; he tires of the dance of childlike surrender and adultish weltschmerz familiar from the aforementioned films; and yet he still can’t bring himself to leave. As his true problem becomes clear, so to does the significance of Jacobs’ achievement, which is nothing less than the definitive portrait of one of life’s messier stages. Mikey is on the brink of the forbidding stretch of middle adulthood, his parents are getting older, and the miles between New York and L.A. mean there are a countable, finite number of times he’ll see them again. His and his wife’s apartment is barely furnished; the walls are pictureless—here begins the real, scary world.

See, Mikey’s problem is actually quite simple: He is depressed, gripped by a sprawling, oceanic melancholy. Granted, this condition is not new to cinema, but the empathic accuracy of Jacobs’ rendering is. Mikey, brought to shambling life by Matt Boren, is by turns sympathetic, despicable and pitiable in his attempt to pull himself out of the quicksand of sadness. Depressed people hurt, but they also hurt people, and Jacobs is brave enough to let us love and loathe Mikey as he weaves a tangled web of lies to prolong his stay just one more day, just one more day. The indignities of hiding drunkenness from his parents and regressing into adolescent petulance are balanced by the comfort of being surrounded by the sounds and stresses of an adult life that doesn’t yet ask anything of you, but that takes care of you instead. Momma’s Man illuminates this fragile longing with such patience and humility that the film is over before you realize you’ve been waiting for just such a portrait of 21st-century sadness.