When movies tell a story that features dramatic and comedic elements pretty equally, we’ve taken to calling them dramedies. Many indie movies fall into this category, because the category itself usually lives and dies on acting and screenwriting—two things that are more dependent on talent than they are funding. The best thing we can hope for from these movies is that we care enough about the characters to find the dramatic moments affecting, that the actors are charming enough to make the comedic elements funny, and that enough tonal consistency exists in the script that the success of one element doesn’t sabotage the success of the other. Adult Beginners, the new film from co-writers Nick Kroll, Liz Flahive, Jeff Cox, and director Ross Katz, is solid enough that it accomplishes all of these essential goals, but never so successful at them that it truly excels.
The story sees Kroll playing one of those adults in an arrested state of development who these indie dramedies love so well. He’s financially crashed and burned while trying to launch an internet startup and now he has to go back to his childhood home to stay with his sister (Rose Byrne), her husband (Bobby Cannavale), and their three-year-old son (Caleb and Matthew Paddock). While their life seems more idealistic on the surface than his, parenthood has lead to them having their own problems, and when they all start bubbling to the surface and their lifestyle starts to chafe against Kroll’s, we then have adequate enough sources for comedy and pathos alike.
As was mentioned earlier, the nuts and bolts of this movie are fine, so in general it’s fine. The characters are well drawn and played by talented, likable actors, so you care when they’re going through something rough and you laugh when they’re saying something funny, but there are still a few things holding Adult Beginners back from being a true success. While you care about the characters in general, they way they’re drawn is so archetypical for indie movies like this that watching them navigate their travails can feel quite a bit like experiencing deja vu. And while the film does feature a few really big laughs, the chuckles don’t come consistently enough for it to succeed as a straight up comedy. The biggest problem may be that the story peters out a bit in the third act though. The tension and the conflict builds well throughout, but their resolution comes in a scene that exists as a too on the nose visual metaphor—so suddenly there is clunkiness where the movie needed there to be catharsis. Adult Beginners is well-acted and entertaining enough to be a perfectly pleasant diversion, but it just misses that next level of being a truly memorable film.
