Full Grown Men

Essentially Judd Apatow’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Full Grown Men tells of a Comic-Book Guy’s Odyssean journey through a Crayola-colored indie Ameriland. Thrown out of his house by his wife, Alby (Matt McGrath) and his collection of action figures return to his catatonic mother’s roost, where he further retreats from adulthood until he’s inspired to call his tubby childhood bud, Elias (Judah Friedlander), in a half-assed attempt at owning up to past indiscretions. Their subsequent road trip is an overwritten survey of a country whose people are trapped in various states of arrested development (literally so in the case of a group of mentally retarded children), and as in Juno, it becomes necessary to look beyond the twee aesthetic, quirk, and self-cocooning to appreciate the story’s sincerity. Cool: Amy Sedaris’s bartending wannabe clown acknowledging that her name, Trina, is short for “vagina.” Not cool: how the insight into Alby’s subliminal need to have everything handed to him is squandered when a group of midget clowns beat him up because he can’t pay his tab. For better and for worse (at least for a story about a man struggling to behave like an adult), Full Grown Men feels and thinks with the heart and mind of a child.
July 25-31, 2008