Momma’s Man
Directed by Azazel Jacobs
Steven Spielberg says he made Schindler’s List for his mother and Saving Private Ryan for his dad. Jewish-American parental tribute also distinguishes Momma’s Man, the semi-autobiographical film by Azazel Jacobs. Azazel is son of the experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, yet this movie expresses awe for his mother, Flo. (The Jacobses portray Mom and Dad, while the role of the son, here named Mikey, is played by actor Matt Boren.)
This story of Mikey leaving his wife and child in Los Angeles to return to the nest of his parents’ Tribeca loft shows personal commitment much like Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. At heart, it’s a psychological (passive-aggressive) war story in a deceptively domestic setting. Azazel’s middle-class, artsy background weighs on him just like the historical burdens Spielberg dramatized. Within its modest docudrama style, Momma’s Man addresses universal experience as presumptuously as does a mainstream Pop epic.
How so? Mikey typifies Gen-X, the post-Vietnam, non-military generation—as well as the post-Holocaust generation (suggested by Dad reading Chris Hedges’ American Fascists)—whose casual, privileged approach to the world leads to the purposelessness and alienation that Azazel openly depicts. A veteran of the Kurt Cobain army, Mikey revisits the angsty solipsism that has done him no good. Sitting in his teenage loft bed, Mikey finds his guitar and a high school notebook of song lyrics and practices an old complaint, “Stupid whore/Fuck, fuck you/Hope you die, too.” That Azazel recognizes Mikey’s regression separates Momma’s Man from most self-absorbed indie films.
In a welcome rebuke to Noah Baumbach’s smug semi-autobiographical The Squid and The Whale, Azazel implicates himself in this family portrait, rather than flaunt its advantages. The Jacobses’ cluttered artists’ space may hide wonders rivaling Kane’s storehouse, but it’s also crippling. Ken and Flo’s participation (their non-actors’ awkwardness and sincerity) transmits genuine warmth, palpable family intimacy—and crisis. Dad smiles but can’t articulate the affection that is the foundation of their relationship. He gives Mikey an old wind-up crawling plaything (its baby-doll legs and anomic machine body specifically symbolize Mikey’s condition). Whereas Mom is solicitous and almost nagging, her intuitive mother-child connection is the damnedest thing since James Toback’s The Gambler script, in which a man vouched for his mother’s identity: “I’m her son! I came out of her womb!”
Azazel’s unabashed family candor salutes both parents: The father’s intransigence and the mother’s patient intimacy are genuine gifts compared to the snobbery and conceit exhibited in The Squid and the Whale. But a nearly farcical sadness results as Mikey becomes a modern-day Oblomov, indulging sloth and inertia. He drifts into startlingly familiar situations: one night he drunkenly sneaks home, which is resonant; later the parents confront their petulant kid, which is quiet, primal comedy. Mikey’s too-early midlife crisis shirks responsibility as a husband, father and employee for reading comic books while still in his underwear. Like his best friend Dante (Piero Arcilesi), another artist’s son who retreats into himself, Mikey’s stasis exemplifies an authentic class problem.
The title Momma’s Man suggests generational infantilization. It’s a young, white adult’s version of the condition John Singleton observed in the underrated 2001 Baby Boy—another unique attempt to make sense of the masculine insecurities that film culture usually flatters and mollifies. Momma’s Man and Baby Boy sketch something that has gone horribly wrong after the baby boom, and in Azazel’s case it seeps into the film itself. The pallid texture and under-dramatized style show narrative restraint (reflecting his elite upbringing?) that refuses the variety and richness of Spielberg’s cinema. This temperamental difference evokes a memorable James Baldwin essay: “Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum—that is, any reality—so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself.”
Mikey’s problem—and the film’s joylessness—evidences personal distrust. Azazel’s honesty about a pampered scion creating his own ennui is laudable, but it’s also frustrating that he stops short of showing Mikey realizing his touchstone. Momma’s Man isn’t Baumbach-rotten, but there’s no elucidation that transcends its artsy “realism.” The iconographic scene of adult Mikey nestled with his parents as they all watch Monsieur Verdoux on TV suggests family feeling yet mutes it. The breakthrough moment—a mother-son pietà—is Chaplinesque, but this pantomime doesn’t go the artistic distance. Mikey communes with his mother, yet stays taciturn like his father. Azazel’s restrained style steps back—almost embarrassed by family passion. Not showing Mikey renew himself at the fountain of his family’s life is less about realism or emotional discretion; it’s a symptom of Mikey’s generational problem: the horrible alienation and self-pity Baldwin perceived long ago.
Ironically the film’s most eloquent moment is Dad’s leveling query “Do you recall us once lying to you?” It stirs quiet shame in Mikey, yet it’s also the curse of enlightened parenthood. A child’s resulting emotional insecurity and intimidation is one of the great complexes of the modern era. Azazel only touches on this, although it was ingeniously expressed in Andre Téchiné’s I Don’t Kiss, when a young man confides, “What hurts me the most. I remember all those things they said to me at home. ‘You’ll be happy, dearest son.’ ‘Nothing will ever happen to you.’ ‘We’ll always be here.’ Thinking of that bullshit makes me feel so awful that I have to come here to hide.”
Téchiné, like Spielberg, is not afraid to express an emotional touchstone such as that promise-theat, “We’ll always be here.” As Mikey goes back to the womb to hide, that promise-threat haunts the movie—and finally frustrates it.
Directed by Azazel Jacobs
Steven Spielberg says he made Schindler’s List for his mother and Saving Private Ryan for his dad. Jewish-American parental tribute also distinguishes Momma’s Man, the semi-autobiographical film by Azazel Jacobs. Azazel is son of the experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, yet this movie expresses awe for his mother, Flo. (The Jacobses portray Mom and Dad, while the role of the son, here named Mikey, is played by actor Matt Boren.)
This story of Mikey leaving his wife and child in Los Angeles to return to the nest of his parents’ Tribeca loft shows personal commitment much like Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. At heart, it’s a psychological (passive-aggressive) war story in a deceptively domestic setting. Azazel’s middle-class, artsy background weighs on him just like the historical burdens Spielberg dramatized. Within its modest docudrama style, Momma’s Man addresses universal experience as presumptuously as does a mainstream Pop epic.
How so? Mikey typifies Gen-X, the post-Vietnam, non-military generation—as well as the post-Holocaust generation (suggested by Dad reading Chris Hedges’ American Fascists)—whose casual, privileged approach to the world leads to the purposelessness and alienation that Azazel openly depicts. A veteran of the Kurt Cobain army, Mikey revisits the angsty solipsism that has done him no good. Sitting in his teenage loft bed, Mikey finds his guitar and a high school notebook of song lyrics and practices an old complaint, “Stupid whore/Fuck, fuck you/Hope you die, too.” That Azazel recognizes Mikey’s regression separates Momma’s Man from most self-absorbed indie films.
In a welcome rebuke to Noah Baumbach’s smug semi-autobiographical The Squid and The Whale, Azazel implicates himself in this family portrait, rather than flaunt its advantages. The Jacobses’ cluttered artists’ space may hide wonders rivaling Kane’s storehouse, but it’s also crippling. Ken and Flo’s participation (their non-actors’ awkwardness and sincerity) transmits genuine warmth, palpable family intimacy—and crisis. Dad smiles but can’t articulate the affection that is the foundation of their relationship. He gives Mikey an old wind-up crawling plaything (its baby-doll legs and anomic machine body specifically symbolize Mikey’s condition). Whereas Mom is solicitous and almost nagging, her intuitive mother-child connection is the damnedest thing since James Toback’s The Gambler script, in which a man vouched for his mother’s identity: “I’m her son! I came out of her womb!”
Azazel’s unabashed family candor salutes both parents: The father’s intransigence and the mother’s patient intimacy are genuine gifts compared to the snobbery and conceit exhibited in The Squid and the Whale. But a nearly farcical sadness results as Mikey becomes a modern-day Oblomov, indulging sloth and inertia. He drifts into startlingly familiar situations: one night he drunkenly sneaks home, which is resonant; later the parents confront their petulant kid, which is quiet, primal comedy. Mikey’s too-early midlife crisis shirks responsibility as a husband, father and employee for reading comic books while still in his underwear. Like his best friend Dante (Piero Arcilesi), another artist’s son who retreats into himself, Mikey’s stasis exemplifies an authentic class problem.
The title Momma’s Man suggests generational infantilization. It’s a young, white adult’s version of the condition John Singleton observed in the underrated 2001 Baby Boy—another unique attempt to make sense of the masculine insecurities that film culture usually flatters and mollifies. Momma’s Man and Baby Boy sketch something that has gone horribly wrong after the baby boom, and in Azazel’s case it seeps into the film itself. The pallid texture and under-dramatized style show narrative restraint (reflecting his elite upbringing?) that refuses the variety and richness of Spielberg’s cinema. This temperamental difference evokes a memorable James Baldwin essay: “Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum—that is, any reality—so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself.”
Mikey’s problem—and the film’s joylessness—evidences personal distrust. Azazel’s honesty about a pampered scion creating his own ennui is laudable, but it’s also frustrating that he stops short of showing Mikey realizing his touchstone. Momma’s Man isn’t Baumbach-rotten, but there’s no elucidation that transcends its artsy “realism.” The iconographic scene of adult Mikey nestled with his parents as they all watch Monsieur Verdoux on TV suggests family feeling yet mutes it. The breakthrough moment—a mother-son pietà—is Chaplinesque, but this pantomime doesn’t go the artistic distance. Mikey communes with his mother, yet stays taciturn like his father. Azazel’s restrained style steps back—almost embarrassed by family passion. Not showing Mikey renew himself at the fountain of his family’s life is less about realism or emotional discretion; it’s a symptom of Mikey’s generational problem: the horrible alienation and self-pity Baldwin perceived long ago.
Ironically the film’s most eloquent moment is Dad’s leveling query “Do you recall us once lying to you?” It stirs quiet shame in Mikey, yet it’s also the curse of enlightened parenthood. A child’s resulting emotional insecurity and intimidation is one of the great complexes of the modern era. Azazel only touches on this, although it was ingeniously expressed in Andre Téchiné’s I Don’t Kiss, when a young man confides, “What hurts me the most. I remember all those things they said to me at home. ‘You’ll be happy, dearest son.’ ‘Nothing will ever happen to you.’ ‘We’ll always be here.’ Thinking of that bullshit makes me feel so awful that I have to come here to hide.”
Téchiné, like Spielberg, is not afraid to express an emotional touchstone such as that promise-theat, “We’ll always be here.” As Mikey goes back to the womb to hide, that promise-threat haunts the movie—and finally frustrates it.
