When Solitary Man opens, we are introduced to Michael Douglas’ character Ben Kalmen as he gets a routine checkup from his long-time pediatrician. The doctor seems to know Kalmen well, they have an easy banter, and Kalmen doesn’t give up the opportunity to try and sell a car during the appointment. See, Kalmen is a car salesman, and not just any car salesman, he’s that one you know from TV; the one with more lots than he can remember, the one swimming in money, the one drunk on pseudo fame. Douglas is well suited for the role, that greasy sort of cocky charisma (let’s call it cockrisma from this point forward) that he has become known for seems to just ooze out of his pores in this film. But here, in this scene, he is spirited and optimistic in a way that takes the edge off the ego. This all changes, seconds later, when he’s given the news that he has a bad heart. In that opening scene Douglas is wearing a tan suit, we next join him several years down the road clad head to toe in black. During the time jump Kalmen has made a series of destructive decisions that has left his life in ruins. We don’t see him dress himself in color for the rest of the film. A Johnny Cash song over the opening credits hammers home his “man in black” status. Unlike most stories, Solitary Man isn’t about the rise and fall of its protagonist, it’s about wallowing in what comes after.
It’s not completely clear what exactly has happened to Kalmen between his ill-fated doctors visit and his black clad march through the title sequence, but we’re given enough over the course of the first act to figure it out. He has been indicted for some sort of book keeping misdoings, lost his fortune, and nearly spent time in jail. His wife has divorced him, and a string of conquests with increasingly younger girls has taken her place. He won’t let his grandson refer to him as grandpa and tells his daughter to pretend like they’re an item when other young women are around. Couple this with his newfound, morose fashion statement and it’s clear that Kalmen is a character that is completely preoccupied with his own mortality. Despite this, and despite the title of the film that would point to, oh I don’t know, some sort of solitary existence, the meat and potatoes of the film are Kalmen’s relationships with other people, the way they react to his showy but hollow cockrisma, and what that tells us about him as a man. He has an unhealthily frank, usury relationship with his daughter Susan (Jenna Fischer). His ex wife Nancy (Susan Sarandon) views him with a restrained sort of pity and regret. His grandson, Scotty (Jake Siciliano), is the sole individual naïve enough to still worship the ground he walks on despite constant disappointments. He seems to be with his girlfriend Jordan (Mary-Louise Parker) more for her father’s business connections and less because of any sort of emotional connection they share, and Jordan’s daughter Allyson (Imogen Poots) regards both him and her mother with open disdain. And Allyson, oh Allyson, she’s where everything goes totally wrong. Despite years of cheating, lying, and other generally jerk-like behavior, Kalmen is still hanging on by a bit of a thread when we are reintroduced to him. None of the people in his life are happy with what he’s become, but he’s just charming enough, just hangdog enough that he’s able to play them all in just the right way so that they haven’t completely dismissed him. Kalmen knows how to get people to respond, he knows how to get himself out of trouble. He’s a slick-talking shyster. During the first act of the film Kalmen is on a half-hearted mission to get his life back on track. I say half-hearted not because he doesn’t have the proper ducks lined up in a row to get him back on his feet financially, but because he seems to only care about repairing his status, rebuilding his bank account, and doesn’t at all intend on repairing his broken relationship with his family. His daughter floats him money to cover his rent, his girlfriend is making sure that her influential father is going to get all the right people to sign off on Kalmen getting a new car lot up and running. Early on we don’t know if we should root for him to succeed or not. He still intends on cheating on his significant other, he’ll still miss his grandson’s birthdays because of his own narcissism; but at least he’s trying to rebuild his career. That should give us something to get behind right? All we need is a little smidge of positive motion, a little glimmer of possible redemption to get behind even the most loathsome of protagonists. That uncertainty about Kalmen as a man, that fogginess about who we should be rooting for, it all goes out the window when Kalmen is tasked by Jordan with taking Allyson out of town on a college tour. We’ve got a lecherous old man that feeds his self worth by sleeping with young women, we’ve got an eighteen year old girl that hates her mother and is looking to rebel in any way possible. We throw them together, ship them off to a college town and, oh brother, I don’t think there’s much question as to what happens next.
The first act and all of it’s smoke and mirrors about money troubles and getting new dealerships off the ground proves to be little more than an extended set up. It’s this college trip that finally gets us to what the film is really about. While spending time at his old alma mater Kalmen meets a socially awkward sophomore named Daniel (Jesse Eisenberg) that he takes under his devilish wing and teaches to pick up women, he reconnects with a much more down to earth than himself old friend and classmate named Jimmy (Danny Devito), and he manages to weasel his way into Alysson’s just barely legal pants. The segments where Douglas interacts with Eisenberg and Devito’s characters are by far the most effective bits of the film. The tryst with his girlfriend’s young daughter is a step too far toward depravity, both for the audience and the other characters in Ben’s life. Any sympathy or support the character might have garnered is gone. His chance at landing a new dealership is ruined by his now scorned girlfriend. His daughter stops floating him money to pay his lavish rent. If the first half of the film is an introduction to a falling character, the second half of the film details the enveloping misery of hitting rock bottom.
The film is mostly about being an acting showcase for Douglas. The put together, smooth talking, loose moraled rich guy character is what he’s known for and Ben Kalmen could be seen as an amalgamation of many of the characters he’s played in the past. I imagine that the part was conceived not only with Douglas in mind but also with the purpose of giving him his quintessential role. The problem with that is Douglas already played his quintessential role, Gordon Gecko, in Wallstreet. Not only does Kalmen have to live in the shadow of that character’s memory, but also it’s a character that Douglas will revisit again later this summer in Wallstreet: Money Never Sleeps, giving Solitary Man the task of competing with that film when it comes to filmgoers’ memories of Douglas’ late career legacy. Despite this, the role isn’t a bad one, and Douglas milks every bit of character he can from what’s written on the page; but it felt too derivative of what he’s done in the past to be something truly memorable like Jeff Bridge’s similar attempt at a career defining role in last years Crazy Heart. Also, while still as charming as ever, Douglas is getting a bit too withered and long in the tooth to pull off what Kalmen has to pull off in the opening scenes of this film. He’s painted as quite the poon hound, and we get numerous scenes of very attractive, very young women having their heads turned at little more than Kalmen walking by with a little strut in his step. Douglas does everything he can to project big and make this stuff work, but he didn’t quite hit believable for me. Later on in the film, after his fall is complete, we get several scenes where a penniless, statusless Kalmen falls on his face in embarrassing fashion while trying to pull off these same old tricks. I enjoyed these scenes a lot more. They certainly rang true to life, and worked to redeem the film of the suspension of disbelief it asked of me in those opening scenes; but they didn’t quite do enough for me to erase that early bad taste in the mouth.
And though I liked those scenes where Kalmen failed with women better than the early ones where he magically picked up whomever he wanted, they weren’t quite enough to keep the second act of the film from getting a little boring. There wasn’t enough of a clear idea where the action was heading. Kalmen, while a serviceable enough character, wasn’t intrinsically interesting enough to support a meanderingly paced slice of life. I needed some narrative tension. I needed something to root for. I needed a visible goal for the film and the character. Without it I found myself nodding off a bit. Also, there was a lot of monologuing throughout the film. I get that the point was to create iconic moments for Douglas, and some of his speeches were a lot of fun, but after a while one long speech after another just became too much and the script started to feel overwritten. This was most apparent in the last scene of the film where Douglas and Sarandon’s characters have a sort of, but not quite, reconciliatory moment. The dialogue completely lays out the motivations for Kalmen’s actions throughout the film in a cut and dried, heavy-handed way that I didn’t need spelled out for me and it made the rest of the film look stupider than it was. Show don’t tell is a cliché for certain, but it’s an often cited rule for a reason. The last scene of this film was way too much telling after we had already been shown, and I found myself wishing it had ended a few minutes earlier with a shared moment between Kalmen and Eisenberg’s character.
In his monologues Kalmen delivers a lot of misguided, but homespun wisdom. “I say a whole bunch of shit, some of it’s even true”. A lot of what he preaches pertains to solitude, to the business nature of even personal relationships; “in your highest and lowest moments you’re alone”. It’s ironic then that the best moments in this film come not from Kalmen’s solitude, but from his supporting characters. The film is at it’s best when Douglas and Devito are trading dialogue. Their old chemistry fires right back up and it’s a joy to watch these two veterans interact, especially in the context of being two old college friends who have taken completely different life paths to completely different results. Shamefully, Devito gets precious little screentime. Similarly, his scenes with Eisenberg also work really well. Their dynamic of guy taking on a mentor role to a young man and eventually learning more truth from the relationship than he is able to impart was an interesting, underdeveloped side plot. Somewhere in this script was a great story about a disgraced businessman traveling back to his old university in an attempt to rebuild his life and right the wrongs of years of bad decisions; a sort of dramatic version of Back to School. Sadly, that film will never be, as this one ignored those promising moments to instead give us too much doom and gloom, too many solitary moments of self-destruction. If one of those secondary characters hung around more frequently and gave us something to care about, Solitary Man could have worked. As is, there is just too much time spent with Douglas’ deplorable wretch, with too little development done to his character. Despite being a bit bored through a lot of the film I still found myself wanting a bit of closure to Kalmen’s “man in black” status. Does he ever go back to wearing normal clothes? Does he ever get over his preoccupation with life’s impermanence? Despite a lot of talking in that last scene, we’re not given a definitive answer. Usually I can appreciate an ending that’s left open to interpretation, but here the film built up a central question about a character’s possible redemption, didn’t completely enthrall me during that building up process, and then didn’t offer up a definitive answer to the question. If Ben Kalmen was a more interesting character, if the way I felt about him was kept more muddy, this might have been okay; but to build up a complete monster of a character and then have no pay off or consequences to his creation made me feel as if I was left hanging.
