Screened Out – A.C.O.D.

[two-star-rating]Adam Scott, Richard Jenkins, Catherine O’Hara, Amy Poehler, Jane Lynch, Clark Duke[/two-star-rating]

You can almost feel the film straining, straining to be funnier, to be more meaningful, to be meaner, and to be quirkier. Instead, it’s merely pleasant and a little dull, boring in that way a date turns dreary if someone starts talking about a horrible childhood.

A.C.O.D. stands for Adult Child of Divorce. Many, many people in my generation, Generation X, and the generations that followed are A.C.O.D. This flick says that mine is the first generation where divorce is a predominant reality. However, this film fails to convince us whether that fact has somehow psychologically shaped us, or whether this is just an invented problem.

Scott (Parks and Recreation) is an overly responsible, adult son of dad Jenkins and mom O’Hara. Because of their messy divorce, Scott became the parental figure for the entire family. Both Jenkins and O’Hara are remarried, but their hate for each other burns as bright as the day they separated almost three decades earlier. When blithe little brother Duke announces his own marriage, Scott has to come to grips with immature parents, his role in the family, and his family’s effect on his own romantic life.

To provide a narrative structure, we also have Lynch, a self-help author who used Scott and other children of divorce in a bestseller years before. Now, she’s planning a sequel with what seems to be an obvious bias, to show that these kids are still messed up as adults.

I wasn’t surprised that it’s all based on the real life of first-time director Stu Zicherman.

He makes an assumption I don’t see as true. I don’t see a generation full of emotional tics, fear of commitment, paralysis in romance, and inability to start a family. The film cannot say whether one generation is any more messed up than others. Without statistics, and Lynch could’ve provided them, Scott seems like nothing more than a victim, partially his parents’ faults, partially self-inflicted.

[rating-key]

What would’ve worked are more comedy, more cruelty, and seriously, more distinctness of character and situation. There’s a certain blandness that layers over the whole operation.

The acting is OK, the actors running with whatever laughs they can get out of the material. Moments of maudlin and meaning, with requisite hip, slow music playing over, bog the film down. Whole periods of time and important scenes seem skipped over, as if the filmmakers know this entire operation is kind of milquetoast; they want to get it over with as soon as possible.

Still, it’s not the worst film ever made, partially because the cast just cannot totally suck. There are even a couple smiles, if not total laughs.

However, if I were on a date with any of these people, I’d probably try to desperately steer the conversation to something, anything more interesting and less self-pitying. Too bad the filmmakers couldn’t have done the same.