For his third feature, Momma's
Man, micro-budget
filmmaker Azazel Jacobs shoots in his boyhood home, and has his parents Flo and
Ken—the latter a legend of avant-garde cinema—playing, essentially,
themselves. Then he casts Matt Boren as their grown son, an L.A.-based husband
and father who flies into New York City on business, stays with his parents,
and has a hard time leaving. Initially, Boren claims he's having trouble with
his flight out. Then he starts cooking up vague, defensive excuses for his
wife, like "Do you know what it's like to watch your parents get old?"
Eventually, he stops trying to explain himself at all, and just settles into
long days of playing with toys, picking at his guitar, and calling up old
friends to see if they remember the person he used to be.
Momma's Man is a comedy of sorts, though to
Jacobs' credit, he doesn't aim for cheap laughs. When Boren's mother asks if
he's reluctant to go home because his wife's having an affair, Boren shrugs and
says yes—a convenient lie that would be a lot funnier if Jacobs didn't cut
several times to Boren's wife back in L.A., stressed out and undeserving of
being tagged a Jezebel. And when Boren caterwauls his way through a profane
love song he wrote as a teenager, Jacobs gets a good chuckle out of the annoyed
voice of Boren's father, trying to sleep; but he also continues the scene and
the song for another minute, so it becomes less of a gag and more an
illustration of Boren's near-psychopathic insensitivity.
Indie films about arrested
adolescence have practically become a genre, but the way Jacobs avoids pat
explanations for Boren's behavior—or any kind of forced
catharsis—is so refreshingly low-key that it's easy to feel like Jacobs
has reinvented the wheel. Honestly, he hasn't, but Momma's Man is a welcome change of pace
regardless. If nothing else, Jacobs has the set of a lifetime in his folks'
cluttered apartment, a cavernous space subdivided into a labyrinth of shelves,
mirrors, and tchotchkes. Depending on where Jacobs places the camera, the
apartment looks like an entirely different place. Why would Boren want to leave?