SUNDANCE ’22 REVIEW

Sundance ’22: Losing Life’s Popularity Contest With ‘WHEN YOU FINISH SAVING THE WORLD’

Name: Sundance ’22: Losing Life’s Popularity Contest With ‘WHEN YOU FINISH SAVING THE WORLD’
Item: When You Finish Saving The World
Rating: 85
Author: Matt Oakes

By Matt Oakes · January 22, 2022

Jesse Eisenberg‘s debut feature When You Finish Saving the World is a cantankerous study of an insufferable family trying – and failing – to live together peacefully. Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard) is pouty and dense. Evelyn (Julianne Moore) is self-important and overbearing. He livestreams his folksy music to an eclectic mix of international audience members for crypto tips. She (admirably) runs a women’s shelter. But no one at her workplace really likes her. And no one at Ziggy’s school really likes him either. Neither get enough praise in their estimation. Both are an absolute drag to be around.

Moore and Wolfhard are perfectly cast as mother and son who hate each other’s guts. It’s basically We Need to Talk About Kevin as a cringy A24 comedy-drama. And no one gets murdered. The pair are two sides of the same awful coin who can never seem to get along or fall in sync with one another’s off-putting rhythms, despite their gnawing similarities. With his first feature, Eisenberg populates his story with the kind of prickly characters he’s played his whole career, asking us to consider the plight of the unpopular. One could imagine a younger Eisenberg playing Ziggy since he generally tilts towards unlikable characters, an assumed favorite trait for any and all of Eisenberg’s casting choices.

Mother and son both are unbearable narcissists with different generational temperaments. Evelyn is the weathered, worn down version of Ziggy. Smoothed over perhaps through her years rotating around the globe but just as inherently repugnant with just about everything she does. Even when she tries to be nice, there’s something plainly manipulative and disagreeable about Evelyn. Ziggy is somehow both a try-hard and a goon, not-so-casually slipping a mention of his “20,000 followers” into just about any conversation he could. For some, being at the mercy of these characters for nearly 90 minutes will be straining but solid performances and Eisenberg’s mission to humanize these thorny characters makes it a worthwhile venture.

A brutal testament to the concept that we don’t choose our family members, When You Finish Saving the World takes its time unpacking the mother-son bond at its center. Each strike out to find a replacement of sorts for the gaping hole where their relationship should be – Evelyn with a newcomer’s enthusiastic son Kyle (Billy Bryk), Ziggy with his political-activated crush Lila (Alisha Boe), also cringy.

There’s a lot of DNA from Noah Baumbach’s more somber early work (especially the Eisenberg-starring The Squid and the Whale) but Eisenberg shows enough of a voice to call his own. Idiosyncratic but purposeful, Eisenberg’s film champions the idea that characters don’t need to be likable to be interesting. Only in its final moments does When You Finish Saving the World reveal the slightly emotional side it had been concealing all along. Mother and son may always be ill-matched but at least they finally look up and see each other. If just for a moment.

CONCLUSION: Adapted from the audiobook he penned, Jesse Eisenberg’s debut film is a prickly drama about a mother and son who don’t like each other much at all. Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard are perfectly cast as unpopular figures struggling to make an impact. If you can handle their unpleasant company, ‘When You Finish Saving the World’ welcomes you into its stiff, cold embrace.