{"id":20582,"date":"2023-08-17T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-08-17T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=20582"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:16:13","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:16:13","slug":"review-the-adults","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/review-the-adults\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Adults<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We first meet Eric (Michael Cera) as he settles into his hotel room, and it\u2019s the kind of private moment where you can size someone up pretty quickly. He plugs in his bluetooth speakers and his laptop computer, unpacks his things, and fields two calls: first he lies to his friends, saying he can\u2019t come by tonight because he has to go see his family, and then lies to his family, saying he has to go see his friends. Then he goes out to find a game. Eric is a compulsive gambler, you see, and everyone regards him with understandable suspicion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This description might imply that The Adults<\/em> is some sort of gambling addiction drama, an Owning Mahowney<\/em> for Millennials, but this angle ends up being a bit of a head fake. It\u2019s not that Eric doesn\u2019t have a gambling problem; he ends up turning what was to be a weekend visit into a multi-day affair, changing his flight home each day when another (higher stakes) game becomes available. (This is, it\u2019s very clear, the only reason he\u2019s extending his trip, though he spins it otherwise for his family.) But the film isn\u2019t about<\/em> his gambling problem. It\u2019s about the elements of his family life, and of his own personality, that have resulted<\/em> in a gambling problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eric is visiting his hometown in upstate New York; he lives in Portland now, and although he travels a lot for his job, he hasn\u2019t been home in three years. His two sisters remained behind, to take care of their dying mother and of each other: older sister Rachel (Hannah Gross), who conveys her frustration and depression in a facade of sarcasm, and younger sister Maggie (Sophia Lillas), the cheerful, optimistic charmer who is trying, with some difficulty, to keep things together. Each and every one of them is a total mess, albeit in their own hyper-specific way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are prickly catch-up conversations and endless insinuations, and writer\/director Dustin Guy Defa has a keen ear for the varying strands of poor communication in a dysfunctional family. Everyone has a customary role to play, and all of them quickly fall back into their regular rhythms, patterns, and expectations; they relate entirely via familial running gags, cutting barbs, and seething resentments, and when they can no longer bear to speak to each other, or can\u2019t find the strength to say things directly anymore, they do weird little characters for and with each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Yet their timing is off. \u201cWhen did you start being like this?\u201d Eric asks Rachel early on, after an especially thorny interaction; later, he asks Maggie pointedly, \u201cWhy does Rachel hate me?\u201d He seems to be overstating his case\u2014they\u2019re all drama queens, at one time or another\u2014but in one extraordinary scene, Defa hones in on how the smallest slight (in this case, the running of a vacuum cleaner) can be seen as an act of total emotional brutality. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to fucking be this way with me!\u201d he despairs, and everything vomits out of them both, a torrent of words and accusations and bad-faith interpretations, a poorly-built dam giving way to a lifetime of victimhood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Defa\u2019s last film, Person to Person<\/em>, was a little gem, the kind of low-key indie New York ensemble comedy\/drama that you keep thinking they don\u2019t make anymore, until they do. He works in a likably deadpan style; he loves his characters, and he\u2019s not judging them, but he\u2019s certainly not protecting<\/em> them either. Cera was part of the Person <\/em>ensemble, and he gets even more to work with here, proving particularly adept in recent years at playing characters who are just barely <\/em>functional. (He has a very funny, very odd monologue during one of the poker games that I wouldn\u2019t dream of spoiling.) Gross and Lillas have less to play, since they spend most of the picture in his orbit, but they find and squeeze the nuances of these characters so adroitly that by the end, these three really do feel like something resembling a family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Defa overplays his hand a bit in the third act, hitting the emotional crest firmly, but then going on a few scenes too long. There\u2019s a wordless interaction between them at a party that\u2019s both emotionally and cinematically satisfying (especially if you like French New Wave movies)\u2014so much so that there\u2019s nothing they can say explicitly after that which they\u2019re not saying implicitly right then. But this is a minor complaint; I kept thinking about an early scene, when they\u2019re in the midst of one of their endless role-plays, and Rachel asks her brother, pointedly, \u201cHow far are you gonna take this?\u201d It\u2019s a key question, in this movie, and in real life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

B<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

“The Adults” is in theaters Friday.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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