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LIFE IS TWEET
After misfiring melodrama Labor Day, you’d think that Jason Reitman might feel like revisiting the smart-with-a-heart black comedy of Up In The Air, Juno, or Young Adult. Gutsily, he’s opted instead for this bittersweet slice of suburban social-media misery, a techno-cautionary tale in which troubled Texas small-town families weave a tangled web online. It’s one of those movies that hymn human connections over kneejerk prejudice – think Crash, but with internet obsessions rather than racial tensions.
Lucid and lacerating about the bitchy, hook-up-obsessed horrors of high school, it doesn’t have the space that Texas-teens TV series Friday Night Lights used to explore similar territory without sensationalism. But where it is happily sure-footed is in Elgort and Dever’s thoughtful, slow-burn romance, conducted in tentative texts and deep teenage conversations (“The earth is just a pale blue dot from space”).
You can’t fault the uniformly excellent performances either, especially Adam Sandler’s. Playing way against type as a downbeat suburban dad as hungry for affection as he is for no-strings sex, he is a revelation here. Too bad that tweeting, emailing and Facebooking are apparently toxic activities, or we’d spread the news…
