Solitary Man, written and directed by Brian Koppelman - Eight out of 10

Solitary Man, written and directed by Brian Koppelman

Eight out of 10

Michael Douglas is a complex, exceptional, great actor, winner of two Academy Awards – one as the producer of the masterpiece One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the other for his memorable performance in the role of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street.

He has proved his immense skill in extraordinary, different types- the shark in Wall Street, the amusing, sophisticated Professor Grady Tripp in Wonder Boys, the attractive detective in Basic Instinct, the flamboyant, gay Liberace in Behind the Candelabra, the vicious, malefic husband in A Perfect Murder, the romantic, comic hero in The Jewel of the Nile and Romancing the Stone.

In this feature he is the Solitary Man, Ben Kalmen, approaching sixty, still very ( or is too?) interested in affairs with women, some, if not most of them much younger than he is, trying to get back in business in the face of opposition and coming close to being a negative character.

The under signed identifies with the personage and therefore is biased and supports the Solitary Man, although many of the things he does, the indifference, self-absorption, lack of empathy, immoral stands, especially, but not by any means only, when he tries to get the girlfriend of his younger friend, Daniel Cheston aka Jesse Eisenberg, to sleep with him.

The hero is seeing a doctor in the first few scenes and the results are not encouraging, though he refuses to know more about the problems with his heart, never mind try to see what the cure, treatment would be…well, he does take some baby aspirins in the morning – we have all heard they are good for the heart, while making a hole in the stomach- for some patients, not all.

The Solitary Man wants to open a new car dealership, getting over a dark chapter in his history, when he has had to spend a day in jail and give almost everything he had to avoid prison, destroying his reputation in the process, appearing in the newspaper with handcuffs on.

For that, and maybe some other reasons, he is dating Jordon Karsch, who wants him to accompany her and her daughter, Allyson aka the beautiful, talented Imogen Poots, to a Boston college campus, where he has good relations with the dean and the library named after him, from the days when he was a successful, honest business man.

When Jordon gets sick, there is some talk about the trip, whether Ben and Allyson would go together, and when they finally depart, the young woman reveals that she had seen the man his mother is seeing with a European beauty, in the process of playing under her skirt, in a bar in the city.

This is where it gets a bit hard to assess what happens, for one from the MeToo movement would fast decide that the abhorrent, older, chauvinist, philandering man is totally responsible and should bear all the responsibility and suffer all that is in store for him and more…perhaps much more.

This cinephile would say that although the Solitary Man is definitely guilty, he might share at least some of the blame (half?) with Allyson, who, in hindsight, played him around her fingers, used him as “boxing gloves” in the match she has with her mother.

Allyson plays not just the innocent, but the poor girl who has had no chance to learn about intimacy, real sex, she has not had the chance to experience pleasure, for she wants things, but the people she had been with had not been able to provide, anticipate it.

Ben Kalmen is trapped – if we are taking this line, which could well be wrong, for the under signed is just another male chauvinist pig head – and he takes the bait immediately – granted, he should have considered his age, the fact that the girl is the daughter of his lover and all the other things that men must have in mind when dealing with women.

Instead, in the next scene we see them embracing with passion, she takes his advice – which she most likely had known well before it was offered – and guides his hands, makes him do what she wants, as the fatherly figure was suggesting in the lessons he was offering to a very well versed, intelligent and shrewd individual who would hit him hard in the next chapters of their encounter.

The Solitary Man wakes up the next morning, alone, while the woman is at the airport somewhere and when he tries to talk to her, at the mother’s house, Allyson turns fiercely against him, says it was all over and then in an abrupt manner, which was probably the whole point from the inception, she tells her mother that the hero has had sex with her.

It is all downhill for the man who does become Solitary, for the girlfriend does not just abandon, but begins to hunt him down, closing all the doors of business for him, the daughter is disappointed because after the Boston one night stand, he has another one with the mother of a colleague of his grandson, therefore the protagonist reaches a nadir.

Whereas he has known the peak of success, remember that the college library in Boston was named after him, he used to have wealth, the Solitary Man is destitute now, has to ask for loans from his daughter and ex-wife, the bank is rejecting him and closing his account, he has almost nowhere to go.

Jimmy Merino aka Danny DeVito is the only friend the hero still has, offers him a place to sleep, then gives him a job as a waiter in his restaurant, which is not yet the lowest point for the unlucky, irresponsible, selfish, greedy, Trumpish, lonely Ben Kalman who has to suffer even more.

Solitary Man is an excellent film.