THE ADULTS - Mark Reviews Movies

The Adults, Variance Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 17, 2023

At a certain point, the people you know the most can become almost akin to strangers. Such is the case for Eric (Michael Cera), the eldest of the three siblings at the center of The Adults. He left his hometown, some anonymous suburban neighborhood, for Portland, leaving behind a mother, who has since died, and two younger sisters. At the start of the movie, it has been about three years since the trio of siblings have seen each other in person, and in theory, big brother has some significant catching up to do.

The whole point of writer/director Dustin Guy Defa's narrative, though, is in watching the various ways that Eric avoids doing that. Here, then, is the story of a family that has more or less lost some vital part of their connection, but the course of that story is intentionally counterintuitive and inherently anticlimactic. Eric really doesn't know his sisters Rachel (Hannah Gross), the elder, or Maggie (Sophia Lillis), the younger, anymore. Instead of trying to rekindle a sibling bond that once was clearly strong, he'd rather arrange a series of poker games with people he barely knows in town.

There is, of course, some sad honesty to Eric's character—a man so obviously alone and lonely that it almost seems as if he has forgotten how to interact with other people, if he ever really knew how to do so in the first place. As played by Cera, he's more than a bit mopey and pathetic, as well as all-too aware of the possibility that he is so, but he comes to life under two situations.

The first is sitting at a table with playing cards in front him, because he gets to pretend to be confident in order to keep anyone from telling if he is bluffing or actually has a good hand. The other is when he's with Rachel and Maggie, specifically when the three aren't talking about their mother, the family home that Rachel took after her death, or the time and space and changes that have come between them. When they're not thinking about the fact that they've grown up and gone through a lot and spent so much time apart, it's almost as they're kids again, without a single care in the world.

Defa's movie, obviously, is more of a character study than something with a describable plot. Most of it amounts to Eric spending time alone, with those barely-can-be-called acquaintances or strangers, and with his sisters. We just watch as he desperately tries to fit into situations that seem foreign to him now.

Cera is no longer the teenager or young adult who could so perfectly embody a sense of bone-deep awkwardness for laughs. Now, he's an adult, clearly capable of channeling a man who spent his younger years in a state of near-perpetual discomfort and now doesn't know how to be the grown-up he's supposed to be.

It's a fine performance in a movie that needs it, especially since it quickly becomes apparent that this is Eric/Cera's show. Defa is so generous and compassionate toward this guy, who knows he has messed up but doesn't have a clue how to start correcting those mistakes. If the movie were even nearly as generous and compassionate with the sisters, it might have accomplished something more than serving as a tough look at someone who sometimes feels like a challenge to be around for long stretches of time.

To be sure, we do vaguely get to know Rachel, who recently broke up with a long-term and on-again-off-again boyfriend, and Maggie, who just quit college because she didn't feel as if she had a place there. The two sisters, who live in the same town but in different houses, never lost contact with each other or lost track of what's happening in each other's life, so they're still as close as, well, sisters who genuinely love each other can be. That's often difficult for Eric to see, because the three of them used to have shared jokes and games and little sketches they used perform together, but he's entirely ignorant of all the jokes, games, and far more serious conversations Rachel and Maggie now share together.

The movie's aimless narrative is somewhat admirable, in that it takes the time to show us all of these little details about Eric, as he evades his sisters a bit because he doesn't feel part of their bond and desperately tries to win at as many poker games as possible, and the siblings. They still have dances, songs, and funnily voiced characters that they developed as kids or teens memorized, and they'll just break those shows out without warning. Maggie wants to feel close to her brother again, and Eric just wants to prove that he's still as funny and charming as his sisters thought he was when they were younger.

It's all so bittersweet and, unfortunately, too shallow—not because the movie doesn't understand these characters, but because it only seems to really care about the sisters in relation to what they mean to Eric. The Adults doesn't necessarily have a perspective problem, so much that is, like its main character, too shortsighted about the people who also matter in this story.

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