Mark Reviews Movies: THE YEAR OF SPECTACULAR MEN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 14, 2018

It makes a lot of sense that the familial elements of The Year of Spectacular Men resonate the most. The movie is a family affair: directed by Lea Thompson, written by Thompson's daughter Madelyn Deutch, and starring sisters Madelyn and Zoey Deutch, along with a prominent supporting role for their mother. The Deutch sisters play sisters, and Thompson plays their mother. There's a real sense of affection and conflict when even two of those actors are on screen. It's the sort of verisimilitude that only rarely is achieved with good casting. Here, the bonds between sisters, as well as between mother and daughters, feel real, because, well, they are.

Deutch's screenplay, though, seems uncertain of its purpose. It begins as the story of Izzy Klein, who's played by the writer. She's about to graduate from college and has no idea what she wants to do with her life. The story follows her relationships with a series of men—from her long-term boyfriend to a young movie director, who likely has never had an actual romantic relationship, and a few men in between. Izzy is a woman who really doesn't know what she wants, but she does want love—real, sincere, and true.

At first, her family is in the backdrop. Her sister Sabrina (Zoey Deutch) is an actress who appears to have it all. She's famous. Her career is on an upswing, and she's dating Sebastian (Avan Jogia), an actor with a steady gig on a TV show. Their relationship looks pretty solid, considering that the two are often separated for work. There are rumors of Sabrina having an affair with a co-star with a bigger name, but it's all bunk that the studio is more than happy to exploit in the tabloids for publicity.

Like Sabrina, the sisters' mother Deb (Thompson) lives in Los Angeles, and after the death of her husband—the sisters' father—she has become involved with the younger Amythyst (Melissa Bolona). Izzy thinks that's just fine. She knows what her mother went through after the husband committed suicide, and the daughter just wants her mother to be happy. Sabrina thinks her father's death was an accident, and she believes that her mother has betrayed the man's memory.

All of this eventually takes center stage in the story, and it leads to a third act that takes full advantage of casting three family members to play fictional people within their real-life familial roles. There's a specific focus in this section that never quite forms until then.

The rest of the movie is basically Izzy falling into and out of a series of relationships, a couple of jobs, and a serious case of what she calls a "quarter-life crisis." As one might suspect from the movie's title, the bulk of the first two acts involves Izzy's dealings with men. They appear to us at first in mock interview sessions after the relationships have ended (With whom and for what purpose are questions that are never answered). All of them found Izzy to be attractive—for assorted reasons—but "neurotic."

The purpose, perhaps, is to show that the perceptions of these men are slightly biased. To blame Izzy for anything bad that happened is, at beast, an exaggeration and, at worst, an outright falsehood. There's her long-term boyfriend Aaron (Jesse Bradford), with whom Izzy lives at the start of the story. The two are often quarrelling over menial things, but the last straw for Aaron is when Izzy announces that she wants to move to L.A. to pursue acting. She has gone through so many phases that Aaron is exhausted and dumps her on the spot.

Thus, Izzy comes to live with Sabrina and Sebastian. Watching the two of them in domestic bliss makes Izzy want that kind of relationship. She flirts with a guy (played by Cameron Monaghan) in her theater class, a narcissist who seems to toy with women by offering the potential of having sex with him. She tries a steady romance with the former drummer (played by Brandon T. Jackson) in Aaron's band. She hooks up with a search-and-rescue employee (played by Zach Roerig) at a ski lodge, and finally, she has heart-to-heart conversations with the director (played by Nicholas Braun) of one of Sabrina's movies.

Most of these flings are played for broad comedy, which is amusing (There's a pair of awkward sex scenes) but slight. Izzy spends the movie in a directionless haze, and none of the relationships with men seem to serve much purpose—other than for a few laughs and the chance for Izzy to find herself rudderless again.

Everything shifts, though, when the family finally comes together for the holidays. There's drama, of course, involving an affair that tears apart two relationships, but unlike Izzy's assorted affairs, there's something substantial and genuine about the scenes between the sisters, which become more important later, and between the sisters and their mother.

The movie's intent suddenly takes shape, and knowing that we're watching a real family playing a fictional one in The Year of Spectacular Men adds a considerable layer of sincerity to these scenes. It's just a shame about the rest of the movie.

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