If you thought a Jesse Eisenberg directorial debut would be as neurotic as the characters he plays, you thought right.
“When You Finish Saving the World” is an adaptation of Eisenberg’s award-winning audiobook of the same name. Serving a dual purpose, the drama acts as the source and auxiliary material for the filmmaker and audience.
Given that the film is only truly faithful to Ziggy Katz’s character, it’s not quite following the footsteps of Stephen Chbosky’s adaptation of his book, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” or Clive Barker’s adaptation of “The Hellbound Heart,” the novella that became “Hellraiser.” Think of Eisenberg’s audiobook as mostly the prequel, which separates three key members of the Katz family who take us through a given day of their lives at different points in their lives over roughly five hours.
The film has the upper hand on the audiobook by bringing the three together: Evelyn (Julianne Moore), or Rachel in the audiobook; her husband Roger (Jay O. Sanders), named Nathan in the audiobook; and their 15-year-old son Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard). Eisenberg’s decisions are unsurprisingly conventional, but that isn’t entirely irredeemable. He knows the basics — letting the frame talk, traditional dramatic beats, distinguishable characters — well enough to hopefully build on them with increasingly ambitious works moving forward.
Occupying most of these familiar dramatic beats are Evelyn and Ziggy navigating their tumultuous relationship. While Evelyn is unable to connect with her son, she looks to a client’s teenage son, Kyle, who is staying at Evelyn’s social services clinic with seemingly greater potential. Ziggy, meanwhile, wants his high school crush, Lila (Alisha Boe), to accept him by any means as he strives for fortune and glory singing mediocre folk rock songs on the Internet.
Wolfhard makes a strong case for his comedic chops, often found in his narcissistic tendencies and cringe-worthy moments, such as desperately learning “how to be political” in order to connect with politically-attuned Lila. But he’s just terribly out of touch — and horny.
His masterplan to woo Lisa by turning her poem about the plight of the Marshall Islands into a song for his online followers quickly goes awry when he boasts to her about profiting from politics. There’s untapped potential in the way he arrives at this absurd logic. Wolfhard’s ability to translate Eisenberg’s quips and quirks presents an opportunity to shine with comedic heavy hitters Greg Mottola and Evan Goldberg.
Ziggy is not the exception to narcissistic tendencies. In an argument with him in the car, Evelyn says that “something switched” in Ziggy when he grew up, presumably the undoing of puberty, but she’s so infatuated with molding Ziggy into her image of what he should be that she can’t accept this stage of his life. In an attempt to not feel like a failure, she tries to mother Kyle — persuading him to attend college rather than work on cars (which is what he loves), sneaking out of the house to take him unsolicited meals, providing him with chores that he’s willing to do around the clinic — while he and his own mother are staying there.
Evelyn’s gestures increasingly push the limits of their boundaries until Kyle’s mother intervenes — the worst we can expect to happen. What comes out of Evelyn’s unsuspecting demeanor and morally ambiguous choices, ending in bouts of tears, is Moore delivering a memorably uncomfortable performance.
Saving the world on their terms is what pulls Ziggy and Evelyn apart and pushes them back together when there’s nowhere else to go in the perfunctory conclusion to this dramedy.
In his unfortunately sparse role as a reserved and defeated father, Roger is caught in the middle of Ziggy and Evelyn’s feud, and sidelined at times. The film undercuts the family’s fascinating exposition offered in the audiobook: Ziggy being called “it” by his father when he was a baby; father and son’s polarizing relationships with an uncle; the immense influence of the mother’s former boyfriend, who dies in war; and the rocky start to parenthood for the parents.
In more ways than one, Charlotte Wells’ 2022 directorial debut, “Aftersun,” is a vastly different film than “When You Finish.” Both are releases from A24, a distributor known for its niche yet growing cinematic appeal. What’s especially concerning is that Wells, a non-actor with mostly short film credits, takes more creative risks (with a payoff) in her debut than Eisenberg — an Academy Award-nominated actor with David Fincher, M. Night Shyamalan and countless other directors on his credits. But the films can be two sides of the same A24 coin. “Aftersun” doesn’t allude to much between the young father and his daughter for most of the film, but it doesn’t completely expose its hand when it does hint at his inner struggles.
Perhaps it wasn’t Eisenberg’s intention to use this mysterious and ominous quality to elevate the most dramatic points of “When You Finish.” But his withholding hints of the richer exposition from his own audiobook prevents the audience from considering that there’s more than meets the eye compared to what unfolds on screen.
“When You Finish Saving the World” is a cautious dance between story and direction that makes for a mostly simple picture. You come for the allure of a directorial debut, but stay for the friction between Wolfhard and Moore.