Sundance Review: Director Jesse Eisenberg's WHEN YOU FINISH SAVING THE WORLD was Annoyingly Juvenile
Jesse Eisenberg, who you know from films such as Zombieland, The Social Network, and more, has made his feature film directorial debut with the film When You Finish Saving The World. The movie premiered at The Sundance Film Festival and it was kind of a frustrating movie to watch with how the characters were handled.
The movie includes all of the quirky things that make a Sundance movie a Sundance movie. It’s politically-charged, it’s a coming-of-age story filled with amusing awkwardness, every relationship is super strained, there’s a dysfunctional family, and then there’s an inappropriate relationship between a mom and a teenage boy.
The film does have a great cast that includes Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard, who both give great performances. Wolfhard plays a teenager named Ziggy who spends a lot of his time singing songs for an online fan base that he’s managed to grow. He’s super proud and very baggy about his accomplishments. Moore plays his mom, Evelyn, who just doesn’t get it. She doesn’t understand what he’s doing with his life. As you might imagine, there’s a lot of arguing back and forth between them. Sometimes it’s amusing, sometimes it makes you want to cringe.
Things take a turn for the awkward when Evelyn, who runs a domestic violence shelter, takes another teenage boy named Kyle under her wing because she sees a bond with Kyle and his mother that she doesn’t have with her own son. While this is going on, Kyle is trying to impress a girl named Lila, who is very engaged with politics and social issues, and she is influencing Ziggy to be more proactive in activism. He’s super awkward around her.
Everything in the film is pretty unconvincing, the whole story is annoyingly juvenile, and the characters are so irritating to watch. Maybe that’s the point? Regardless, neither of the main characters were even likable, I wasn’t invested in them, and I didn’t really care what happened to them.
The uncomfortableness of the movie just builds and builds until it fizzles out with an unsatisfying ending. I don’t want to give anything away, but I’ll just say that the ending didn’t feel earned because there was no work that was put into the story or characters to build up to any kind of relationship with them.
Here’s the description of the film provided by Sundance:
From his bedroom home studio, high school student Ziggy performs original folk-rock songs for an adoring online fan base. This concept mystifies his formal and uptight mother, Evelyn, who runs a shelter for survivors of domestic abuse. While Ziggy is busy trying to impress his socially engaged classmate Lila by making his music less bubblegum and more political, Evelyn meets Angie and her teen son, Kyle, when they seek refuge at her facility. She observes a bond between the two that she’s missing with her own son, and decides to take Kyle under her wing against her better instincts.
In his carefully observed, aesthetically pleasing directorial debut, Jesse Eisenberg adapts his audio project of the same name to tell the story of a mother and son who fail to understand each other’s values. With gentle humor and pitch-perfect dialogue, When You Finish Saving the World reflects a moment of internet fame and youth activism, but it also recounts the timeless tale of parents and children struggling to connect across the generational chasm that separates them.
