Scoundrel Time

Remember when wacky codgers in movies used to sit in rocking chairs on porches dispensing cranky wisdom? Or how, on television, Uncle Joe would be “a-movin’ kinda slow at the junction—Petticoat Junction”? Uncle Joe was played by an actor named Edgar Buchanan, and when the show debuted in 1963, Edgar Buchanan was all of 60 years old.

Sixty happens to be the age of the character played by Michael Douglas in the compelling new movie Solitary Man. Only instead of taking a nice snooze in the afternoon when he should have been helping around the Shady Rest Hotel in Hooterville, Douglas’s character in Solitary Man is sleeping with the 18-year-old daughter of his girlfriend in a Boston hotel, telling his 35-year-old daughter all about the repercussions, and abusing his daughter’s husband for refusing to take risks even as he has to shnorr money to make the rent.

Why on earth would a movie about a reprehensible character like Ben Kalmen be at all worth seeing? Because Solitary Man’s screenwriter and co-director Brian Koppelman is onto something very interesting that doesn’t quite come clear until the movie is almost at its end. This is a movie about a Baby Boomer who, right up until its opening scene, has led a wildly successful life, having grown so wealthy that the library at his alma mater is named after him. He’s a husband and a father (though presumably not a very good husband and not a very attentive father). The movie begins with Ben getting the first real intimation of his own mortality when a doctor tells him, “I don’t love your EKG.” The doctor orders up more tests. The screen goes dark.

We don’t watch Ben’s life spiral out of control; Koppelman and his codirector, Brian Levien, flash forward six years to show us the wreckage. Ben wakes up alone in a jazzy bachelor pad, the wife (Susan Sarandon) he happily mentioned in conversation with his doctor nowhere in evidence. He downs some baby aspirin, dresses himself in funky clothes, and hits the streets of Manhattan. He ends up in a playground, where he tells his adoring grandson not to call him “Grandpa” because it might scare off the hot blonde he has spied over by the benches.

As Solitary Man progresses, we learn that after decades of being New York’s “honest” car dealer, making the cover of Forbes and the New York Times business section, Ben started scamming both buyers and BMW and only avoided prison by paying a colossal fine that wiped him out financially. He is on the verge of staging a remarkable comeback, but then his own determination not to consider the consequences of his actions puts that in danger as well.

And yet Ben is also good-humored, spirited, fun-loving, interested in people and extraordinarily incisive about what they want. He tells people that they have to think about “what you get out of the transaction.” He was a great salesman, he explains, because he always knew what kind of car to put someone in. He knows what other people want before they do, and is able, for a time, to fulfill their desires in a way that fulfills his as well.

You want to hate him but you can’t, quite; you want to understand what drove him to self-destruction when he had everything anyone could ever want. That is due to Koppelman’s brilliant construction of Ben. Koppelman’s screenplay isn’t everything it could be, because it’s full of on-the-nose speeches from other characters about what Ben has done wrong and how his wrongdoing hurts the people he loves and how he needs therapy and so on. But it builds Ben slowly and carefully until he is as fully rounded a character as we’ve seen in an American movie in a long time. And it will be a long time before there is a better American performance by a leading man.

When Douglas is at rest, and isn’t spewing out words or working his vivid eyes and killer smile, he looks startlingly worn, even worn out. The unpitying eye of the camera here offers us a surprising, shocking, even bravely naked look at a soon-to-be little old Jewish man. And it is this fact, this unavoidable fact, the fact of his inevitable decline, that has driven Ben Kalmen off the rails.

“If you’re lucky,” his wife says, “you get old.” But that is not what Ben feels. He had everything, was the focus of everyone’s attention, the star in every room .  .  . until, after a while, he was less of a star, less the focus, more wounded, more fragile, just because that is what happens. He could have accepted it. But that was unbearable to him.

His later-in-life crisis is the crisis of the Baby Boomer generation writ small. In its own way, and perhaps without even knowing it, Solitary Man is the best portrait we’ve yet had of the psychology and motivation of Bill Clinton.

John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.