Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
Follows the story of a group of high school teenagers and their parents as they attempt to navigate the many ways the internet has changed their relationships, their communication, their self-image, and their love lives.
Men, Women & Children tackles the anxieties of internet culture and modern connectivity with an ensemble structure borrowed from crash-style multi-narrative dramas, but the execution is heavy-handed and didactic. The plotting feels schematic, using its characters more as illustrative types than fully realized people, and the thematic messaging about technology's corrosive effects is spelled out rather than dramatized with nuance. The acting from a capable cast (Ansel Elgort, Jennifer Garner, Adam Sandler) elevates the material somewhat, and the cinematography incorporates interesting visual metaphors with internet overlays, but these feel gimmicky over time. The film offers little that wasn't already being explored in cultural conversations at the time, and its ending resolves too neatly for a film that presents such sprawling, complex anxieties. A middling, well-intentioned drama that doesn't fully deliver on its premise.