Solitary Man: BD Review
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Page 1 of 3 Anchor Bay / 90 Minutes / 2010 / Rated R / Street Date: September 7, 2010
As I coasted past the line waiting to get in to see Solitary Man in theatres, I noticed that the entire makeup of the soon-to-be audience consisted of baby boomers and retirees. “What does this mean?”, you ask. Well, it could mean several things. It could mean that I was waiting in line for Michael Douglas’ return to form; to his pre-Catherine Zeta-Jones-stole-my-soul-and-ratcheted-my-face-so-tight-that-I-thought-making-The In-Laws-and -You, Me and Dupree-was-a-good-idea days. It could also mean that I was standing in line with–cutting ahead of actually - a bunch of Michael Douglas fans, true die-hards that remember him from Romancing the Stone, Wall Street, and Fatal Attraction and would be seeing this movie even if it were entirely composed of 90 minutes of outtakes from Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Hell, judging by the complete lack of internet savvy in people my mother’s age this could even have been a Vin Diesel retrospective and everyone had just gotten their days mixed up. While I wish that it had been either option one or *shudder* even option three, it turned out to be option two – 90 minutes of poor writing and even poorer directing with Michael Douglas mailing-it-in to tie it all together. I try to avoid doing work as much as possible, so to paraphrase (i.e. cut-and-paste from the press-release): “Solitary Man tells the story of Ben Kalmen, a fifty-something [Sixty-six last I checked, but nice try PR Fluff guy] New Yorker and former successful car dealer, who through his own bad choices lost his entire business. Ben's on the verge of a comeback, but some of the same motivations that led to his demise are threatening to take him down again. If Ben can just keep his hubris in check for a little while longer, he will be back as big as ever. But circumstances place him in very close proximity with the one girl he shouldn’t touch, throwing everything into jeopardy.”
The movie begins with Douglas’ character in his Doctor’s office six years ago for a physical, resplendent in a middle-aged guys’ finest beige pleated-pants suit chewing the scenery with his salesman’s charm and not letting the Doc get a word in edge-wise. As the scene closes the MD tells him that he wants to run more tests, that he saw something on the EKG that could mean a serious heart condition. Cue the sound fade-out as Douglas stares blankly at the camera. Now, it is 6 years later and Douglas wakes up in his Gordon Gecko-style modern apartment, tosses down some aspirin, throws on his all black ensemble and exits the apartment to the chorus of Johnny Cash’s “Solitary Man”. With his man-in-black ensemble and the movie title choice, it almost seems like the writer/co-director Brian Koppelman heard this song a few years ago and thought that it was a good idea for a movie but didn’t develop it much beyond that. |
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