When You Finish Saving the World review: Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard play superficial people in a superficial movie
Jesse Eisenberg's uninspired feature directing debut follows a mother and son who can't seem to connect
Film Reviews Finn Wolfhard
Image: A24
“Everyone around me is a narcissist,” says one of the characters in Jesse Eisenberg’s When You Finish Saving The World. The line gets a big laugh but it spotlights the tough task that Eisenberg, making his feature writing and directing debuts, sets out for himself; making a movie about two characters who no one would want to spend any time with. At least he had the good judgment to cast likable stars in those unlikable roles, with Julianne Moore as Evelyn, a manager of a women’s shelter in Indiana, and Finn Wolfhard as her teenage son, Ziggy.
Evelyn and Ziggy have lost the mother/son connection; she thinks he’s shallow and he thinks she’s a nuisance and a hindrance. She tries to get him interested in volunteering at her woman’s shelter, but he’s only interested if she’d pay him and he’d rather spend his time composing songs which he livestreams on social apps. Unlike his mother, who’s interested in the world, the only thing Ziggy’s concerned about is increasing his follower count; something he mentions to everyone he meets.
So both Evelyn and Ziggy look for substitutes for each other. She becomes too interested in Kyle, (Billy Bryk) the son of a woman at the shelter (Eleonore Hendricks) who fled her home because of an abusive relationship. Kyle is everything Ziggy isn’t; polite, nice to his mother, good at school and he even speaks Spanish. Evelyn tries to get him a college scholarship but ends up crossing so many social boundaries by forcing her values on him.
Ziggy attempts to branch out from his emo music to more socially conscious material when he meets a fellow high school student who’s also a poet (Alisha Boe). She’s smart, engaged in her community and the world at large. Ziggy clumsily tries to become her friend, hoping her worldliness will rub off on him. Or get him more followers.
This is a story of good intentions gone bad, although since the two main characters are such awful people even that is circumspect. Eisenberg is satirizing a certain breed of white liberal who throws around words like “cultural appropriation” at the dinner table. These types of people think they understand the world, and what needs to be done to make it better. Only they are mostly clueless and concerned with looking good rather than doing good. Both Evelyn and Ziggy are unable to read social or emotional clues. They don’t even understand sarcasm.
But they certainly make for a promising jumping off point for a social satire. However once these characters are introduced—and they are introduced pretty well—the film does nothing intriguing with them. The denouement is clear from miles away. While When You Finish Saving The World acts like a comedy in how the story is set up, the laughs never come. With such awful people at its center, one can suppose it wants to be a cringe comedy or a sophisticated social satire. What it ends up being is hollow. There’s nothing there, beyond those somewhat interesting characters.
Moore gives a restrained performance that miraculously doesn’t judge her character at all, despite the screenplay hammering away at Evelyn’s foibles. Wolfhard has a hard task; he has to be alluring enough for us to understand why he has such a huge online following while also being utterly clueless and inarticulate. Unfortunately his performance tilts towards the latter; he does not find the right balance. In contrast, Bryk is so naturally disarming that one can see why Evelyn would try to “save” him. As his mother, Hendricks provides bite as she goes toe to toe with Moore.
Visually familiar, When You Finish Saving The World doesn’t distinguish itself from many other character driven American independent movies. Eisenberg’s main concern is the screenplay, yet the canvas it’s drawing upon is so small that it boxes its imagination. The conflicts it creates for Evelyn and Ziggy are so simple and easily resolved that the film becomes a throwaway that’s quickly forgotten despite some of the cast’s good work.
37 Comments
So what I’m getting is this movie is all about “Look at the dumb SJW libtards who think they’re so smart.” I can’t wait for Eisenberg to start ranting about how people are too “woke” to appreciate him.
I think you’ve misjudged the intent of the film: white liberals are exactly the target audience, as they are the most willing to watch movies about their own foibles (“foibles” is indicative of affectionate mockery).
Yep. What’s more, it’s healthy to be able to recognize and mock your own side’s failures and weaknesses. I’ve long been worried about the liberal tendency to insist that adhering to progressive ideals is always done in good faith and can never have unintended negative consequences when that’s so clearly not the case.
It amounts to establishing overly broad failure conditions, such that when inevitably something does go wrong, we look like untrustworthy idiots for insisting that this sort of thing thing could never, ever happen and how dare you suggest that it might.
There’s a long tradition of white liberals whipping themselves with a wet noodle for being self-involved, clueless, or insufficiently genuine. The message isn’t usually that the concept of liberalism is stupid, it’s that the character is doing it wrong.
I don’t get that vibe from Eisenberg. If anything its probably a bit of the opposite; get out of your own ass and engage with the world because it needs it.
How dare he?! White liberals are perfect! Is nothing sacred!?!?
I haven’t seen the movie yet, just the trailer, but that’s not the impression I get.It seems less about satirizing liberals as bad people and more just exploring the relationship between mothers and sons. Especially with a specific strain of liberal feminist moms whose sons begin to chafe against that while often not really hating or disagreeing with it. Just when you’re a teenager trying to figure out what it means to be yourself as a man, but your mom is constantly telling you that men ain’t shit, there’s gonna be some conflict. And then on the mom’s side, they see their kid who used to be this cute little muppet that did everything they told them, start to resemble a representation of everything they’ve spent their lives fighting against.Maybe the movie flubs the execution, but that seemed to be more of the intent than anything else.
Have you actually seen the movie? I haven’t, but it sure seems like you haven’t either.
‘why he has such a huge online following while also being utterly clueless and inarticulate”Lmfao. Don’t think there’s much disbelief to suspend for that one.
Sounds like the definition of you tube.
What’s a you tube?
Yeah, but what does Julianne Moore think of Finn Wolfhard as a kisser?
I admit I’m still mystified – of all the great young actor finds of Stranger Things, the one that clearly has much less talent and charisma than any of them is the one whose profile has soared.
well, other than Millie Bobby Brown, who is huge, and Sadie Sink, who is becoming hugeYeah, I though Wolfhard’s performance in the most recent season was pretty terrible
Ah, I wasn’t aware of Sadie Sink becoming huge (other than her massive profile raise in the last season), though it seems inevitable as she’s very good. I didn’t even count MBB, as she’s already ascended to “bankable box office draw” level of fame and is no longer a mere actor.
Sadie Sink is really good, but I think MBB is really unremarkable. Wolfhard is okay, but I just find him a little irritating, which doesn’t make him a bad actor but just harder to watch. My 16-year-old thinks he’s just the best.
The kid who plays Dustin needs to get more movie roles.
That’s what I mean, the profile raise due to “Running Up That Hill” and getting praised by some of the cast like Winona calling her the next Meryl Streep, then getting cast in The Whale and the TSwift video and being a solo lead in another movie, that’s a huge profile raise in one yearGaten Matarazzo was the lead in a romantic comedy opposite Angourie Rice, and he went back to Broadway and took a supporting role in Dear Evan Hansen, he’s going to be Tobias in Sweeney Todd on Bway in a few months, so he’s just making smart moves.
was “Circumspect” the word the reviewer meant to use? I’m not quite understanding it in this context.Too bad the movie flops, Eisenberg is often surprising as an actor, too bad apparently not as a writer
ChatGPT knows what “circumspect” is. It just intentionally misuses words every now and then to make people think a human being wrote the review.Alternatively, maybe it was an autocorrect when the author tried to write “suspect?”
lol! given how many of these reviews lately are just summaries I do somewhat circumspect (suspect) they’re drafted by chatbots.
Funny that in Glass Onion one of Edward Norton’s character’s malapropisms is saying “circumspective” instead of “circumstantial.”
You get a star for that. Why are you in the grays, I forget, do you be trollin?
My old account got Kinja’d to death in late 2021 and apparently my new account can’t get ungrayed no matter how many comments of mine get starred.
Maybe if you change the name on this account, then immediately create a new account through one of the other paths and take the name?I remember a million years ago when they first made us register names, some POSs went around and registered everybody’s names so they couldn’t use them
I thought about that, but I figure I’d probably have the same problem. My old account was linked through Twitter, so with that no longer usable I was free to delete my Twitter account with no problems.
I’ve decided to give your advice a try, so here’s a chance to help my new account get out of the grays.
just as long as you promise never to be mean to anybody on the internetlol
Thanks for the help. I try to always keep my cool on the internet.
Same here.
so only the second worst Ziggy in pop culture.
THE WORST
One would think he’d closed out the category on Ziggys.
That unfunny short cartoon guy that is on bad greeting cards doesn’t count?
Third.
The best thing Finn Wolfhard has ever done was the music video for “Sleep in the Heat” by PUP. That video makes me cry every goddamn time.
If you dont know the meaning of a word, maybe just… dont use it? Because you clearly dont know what “circumspect” means.