Ben Kalmen (Michael Douglas) was once a successful businessman, one of the tri-state area’s biggest BMW dealers. But the results of a routine trip to his physician threw him for a curve, sending Ben into a downward spiral of lies, infidelity, and white-collar crime. All he needs now is one break, and he thinks his current girlfriend, Jordan (Mary-Louise Parker), can supply that break, so he agrees to accompany her daughter, Allyson (Imogen Poots), to a college interview and put in a good word. But being the man he is, Ben screws things up mightily, after which he proceeds to screw things up even further, eventually leaving him with nowhere to go but up.    

CRITIQUE

Solitary Man, directed by David Levien and Brian Koppelman from a script written by Koppelman, is two thirds of a good character study. The remainder of the movie is a letdown of lazy plotting and spell-it-all-out dialogue. What is it with screenwriters and third acts these days?

For its first hour or so, Solitary Man is plotless the way life often seems plotless: things happen, but there doesn’t seem to be some unseen hand guiding or forcing things. It reminded me of the works of Richard Ford and Richard Russo (two of my favorite authors), while at the same time bringing to mind what Richard Yates (to whom Ford and Russo owe a tremendous debt) might be doing if he hadn’t driven himself to an early grave.

Making this sort of storytelling work is an extremely tricky thing to pull off in a movie; the ones that succeed often look like miracles, while the ones that fail look like disasters. Solitary Man looks like both. After the effortless first two acts, the movie takes a bad turn, employing a bit of plotting that’s labored and artificial. It simply doesn’t belong in this movie. It’s obvious plot machinery, not only because it trades what was organic for something transparently artificial, but also because it doesn’t seem a logical consequence of anything that’s come before; it’s a way of moving the story and lead character forward that seems to belong to another story and lead character.

And what follows this unfortunate bit of lapse of reason on the part of the filmmakers is a series of scenes in which several characters gives speeches that sound like nothing more than speeches, telling Douglas’s character (and the audience) things that are already obvious. (Levien and Koppelman’s script for The Girlfriend Experience had almost the exact same problems. Maybe next time I watch a movie in which they’re involved I’ll quit while everyone’s ahead.)

But I like the movie’s first hour as much as I dislike the final thirty minutes. Ben is a loathsome individual, but he’s understandably loathsome; his actions aren’t justifiable, but you can understand their origin. If you’re old enough, you undoubtedly know someone whose moral rudder was destroyed with a single blow, spinning them 180 degrees and setting down a path of self-destructive behavior.

But while having your moral rudder destroyed can be easy, rebuilding it is usually a long and arduous process, and it’s this phase of Ben’s life the movie details. You seeing him constantly doing the wrong things, you see him hustling everyone around him, you see him finally getting hustled (by Poots’s character, who’ll likely scare any male viewer--like me--who’s ever known anyone like her), you see him get what he has coming to him, and all the while you know exactly why it’s happening.

And although this is the sort of character Douglas (who is terrific here) has played more than a few times (and that actually helps, as Douglas’s past, both professional and personal, helps inform his work here), this is one of the rare instances in which he actually has something of a chance of finding some sort of honest redemption (and not the kind his characters usually find, which comes from attempting to murder your mistress in a bathtub or shooting your bewigged ex-lover), which adds another layer of interest to the story.

The movie, primarily through Ben’s interactions with his ex-wife (played by Susan Sarandon) and daughter (Jenna Fischer), also offers a glimpse of what Ben was like before he destroyed his life, and it’s hard not to want to see him turn things around. So everything you need for a compelling story about a slice of this man’s life is there. And that’s exactly why the movie didn’t need to betray itself by turning into just another piece of Hollywood writing in the final third.

THE VIDEO

The 2.35:1/1080p transfer--encoded with VC-1--offer a quite good digital translation of the movie’s visuals, which are about as unadorned as you can get. There’s zero stylization here, with every shot and setting looking as naturalistic as possible, which at times borders on the bland. Still, though, the terminally subdued color palette looks very good, and occasional soft shot aside, the image is sharp and suitably detailed.

THE AUDIO

Lossless audio comes in the form of an uncompressed PCM 5.1 track, which does what it can with the movie’s incredibly ordinary sound design. Virtually everything is locked in the center channel, although there’s some mild music bleed into the left and right fronts, and some even milder into the rears, which on occasion also pump out some hardly noticeable ambiance. Michael Penn’s score (which is so subtle you might not even notice it’s there, making it a perfect fit for the movie) gets a good presentation and dialogue sound perfectly fine.

An English Dolby Digital 5.1 track is also included; English SDH and Spanish subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

The commentary by writer/co-director Brian Koppelman, co-director David Levien, and actor Douglas McGrath is dull, dry, and spotty. The directors don’t have much to say, and McGrath, who appears in one scene in the movie, has even less.

Solitary Man: Alone in a Crowd (12 minutes, SD) is a by-the-numbers making-of featurette.

Closing things out is the movie’s misleading theatrical trailer (which is presented in high-def).

FINAL THOUGHTS