“People Places Things” Review
Or as I like to call it “The Movie With All The Angry, Irrational Women In It”
This past Sunday, I had a long overdue sleepover with my best friend, Jessica. After talking trash about the Kardashians and the Real Housewives of Who Actually Cares, and dinner; we were both ready for the new staple in any sleepover: Netflix. Our only rule? It had to be a cheesy/terrible movie that we could talk trash about during and after the film. After searching we came across People Places Things. Before I jump into the actual review, let me just say that we both thought the movie looked really cute and actually pretty interesting despite its R rating. We certainly didn’t quite expect what we got.
People Places Things is about this guy named Will, played by Jemaine Clement, who has two beautiful twin daughters with his…girlfriend? (Their relationship was never quite specified) Charlie, played by Stephanie Allynne. They live a relatively okay life but Will cannot see Charlie steadily growing unhappy until one day, during their daughter’s 5th birthday party, he catches her right after having sex with some guy named Gary, played by Michael Chernus. The rest of the film shows poor Will trying to manage fatherhood and his job and his broken heart while failing to do all three.
Praises
Let’s uplift the movie before I tear it to shreds since you knew that’s where the review was going anyway.
What I liked about People Places Things was its attempt to do something different. The main character, Will, is a comic book writer/teacher. He’s from New Zealand. He is a single father and for once a man got cheated on instead of a woman getting cheated on. I appreciated the subtle differences from regular movies of this kind. It was refreshing to see the world through a middle aged comic drawer’s eyes.
I also loved the love Will has for his daughters. His is a palpable affection for them. I adored it. His daughters are also very cute and if you’re a child of divorce, such as myself, then you know how it feels to be them. Not wanting your parents to get with anyone else but knowing that they really don’t like each other. It tugged at my heart strings.
I appreciated the diversity in the movie. The fact that Will’s potential love interest is a woman of color and also a professor is fantastic. Even Kat, an African American comic book writer, pleased my heart to see. I definitely don’t see those every day.
Lastly, I genuinely liked Will as a character. Everyone can relate to feeling like a screw up and messing things up all the time. He is the epitome of that. I think the fact that he’s a New Zealander in America highlights how different he is already. He’s full of good intentions but they don’t always turn out the way that he would like. You feel for him especially his awkward speech, way of being, and even the way he tries to do the right thing whenever possible. He is very much a likable character.
Critiques
I must say, I couldn’t wait to get to this part. I have several issues with this movie. One of them being that Will, as much as I like him, is too good of a character. Though he is messy and a screw up, he is a lovable one and the way he is portrayed in the movie, it’s as if he can do no wrong. Even when he is feeding his children pizza for breakfast because he has no groceries, there’s a sense of “awww, but he’s trying his best”.
No. That is not a good main character.
A good protagonist needs flaws that aren’t excusable. Does he have a temper? Does he indulge too much in some form of drug or another? Does he have a certain prejudice? No. Will has none of these things unless comic book drawing counts as a drug. He is an overall lovable guy and the way the movie is constructed no matter what happens to him, you can’t help but cheer him on the way you do a little baby when he’s first learning how to walk. This is further pushed onto the audience by the people he encounters throughout the movie, mainly angry and irrational women which leads me to my biggest critique of the movie.
All of the women in Will’s life, and I do mean ALL, are constantly angry/unhappy and most of the time constantly angry/unhappy with him. Take Charlie, she was angry with Will because…well, that’s never clearly explained. We can piece together, based on dialogue, that Charlie used to live in a wealthy home but she left all that to be with Will. They have children and I suppose the state of their wealth bothers Charlie? And so she got with an aspiring actor…That makes total sense. The details on Charlie’s end are very hazy. All we really see from her is an embodiment of stupidity, selfishness, yelling, and irrationality. When she gets caught with Gary and Will tells Gary to put a shirt on, Charlie flips out for some reason and removes her own shirt to give to Gary, revealing her naked torso underneath. A strange move for someone who just got caught cheating…at her daughter’s birthday party.
Nothing Charlie does really makes any sense to me. One second she’s inviting Will out for coffee to tell him she’s pregnant with Gary’s baby and to ask for his blessing for their potential marriage to yelling at Will for not taking their daughter’s to one cello lesson when she literally dumped them on him without warning because she couldn’t take care of them. Sporadically, she yells at Will that she doesn’t know who she is or that she doesn’t know what she doing and then proceeds to do the same thing to him. She puts herself in bad situations and blames everyone else for them. It’s ridiculous. Her character was designed specifically for the audience to hate her and I could not stand it. Kat even writes a comic book called “Mother F*ckers” about all the men her mother has been with while dating. She also gets frustrated with Will about what he did to her mom. Understandable, yes, but it’s yet another angry woman in Will’s life.
I had a hunch that this movie was most definitely not written by a woman and I was right. The brain behind this movie is director and writer, Jim Strouse. Though I can appreciate his invention of a charming character and a loving dad, I thoroughly abhorred the fact that none of the women in this movie talk about anything else that isn’t either about men or related to the main character who is a man.
Basically I give this movie a 2/5. I truly think if this movie had more realistic portrayals of women, an honest portrayal of the main character would make this movie much better than it was.
