u/TheUrPigeon

Hey all, I'm hoping some folks might have recommendations for me for cyber body mods that are NOT made by sedthS. I'm not sure what else to put here, really! The request is simple haha.

Paper Man (2009) is a baffling movie, one that wades chest deep into extremely treacherous waters without any sense of self-awareness.

Jeff Daniels stars as Richard Dunn, failed author and man incapable of coming to grips with his shortcomings through the ever-slick slime of his self-pity. We arrive on the scene as Richard's long-suffering wife Claire (Lisa Kudrow)--a successful surgeon and star of her professional field--is leaving Richard at a cottage for some time where he can write and "work things out," presumably on her dime as we learn Richard's last novel sold exactly zero copies.

Their relationship is certainly strained--Richard is as absent in his marriage as he is in life--still, it bears noting that the love there must have been a deep and abiding one for her to tolerate him as long as she seemingly has. As she leaves him, one gets the sense that the script thinks our sympathies ought to lie with Richard; just the first of many, many moments of cognitive dissonance to follow.

After spending some time impotently obsessing over the name of the protagonist for his next would-be novel (which we learn he has not even begun writing and will not begin writing for the entirety of the film) Richard ventures into the nearby town where he meets Abbie (Emma Stone).

Abbie fits into the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope so snugly that it is hard to refer to her as anything else, even her character's name.

So, Manic Pixie Dream Girl is young (too young by far for Daniels' character), attractive, unusually mature for her age, insightful, free-spirited and struggling to process a tragic trauma from her past (I told you the fit was snug). When we meet her, she's in the grips of an abusive relationship with her shitty (but age-appropriate) boyfriend who the movie goes way out of its way to paint as an absolutely irredeemable asshole (more on that later).

The alarm bells really start screaming when Richard hires Abbie to babysit for him later that week despite being childless, a fact he only reveals to her when she arrives at and has entered his cottage (well, Claire's cottage). Despite some telling awkwardness, the first meeting passes relatively harmlessly, so one might be forgiven for thinking that assumptions had been made about the script and perhaps that was unfair.

It was not.

After falling in love with a teenager who made him soup one time, Richard returns home from the bar drunk one night and comes onto Abbie. I need to be totally clear at this point that Abbie is fifteen and looks it. Richard is 45+ and looks it.

Richard later makes a half-hearted attempt at reframing this event, but even by the film's own direction, acting and script, it is clear this middle-aged man is attempting to be physically intimate with a teenager. It was at this point I started to wonder just what the fucking fuck I was actually fucking watching and how so many talented actors seemed to have gotten roped into it.

At any rate, Abbie hits him with a book and escapes the scenario. Incredibly, Paper Man thinks the audience still has enough empathy for Richard at this point that he can stay on as its protagonist for the remainder of its runtime.

Now, I'm not one to think a protagonist must always be likeable or relatable, but if you're going to write a despicable main character, your story needs to acknowledge that they are despicable. Paper Man never comes close to condemning its protagonist's actions in the way that it needed to, rather attempting to brush past serious transgressions as if they were merely an embarrassing faux pas for everyone involved (as opposed to exclusively for Richard).

Astoundingly, Abbie and Richard's "friendship" continues well beyond this interaction to the point of him hosting a kegger party for her, her boyfriend and seemingly the rest of the town's teenagers at the cottage his estranged wife is renting for him so that he can sort his shit out.

Richard dresses young and parties with the teenagers, who are drinking and having underaged sex in the cottage. Again I thought to myself that this could be the tipping point, that the police would arrive due to noise complaints at any moment and Richard would be arrested for any number of crimes.

Instead, the party goes on as if this is relatively normal with only Abbie's boyfriend and a pair of young girls properly remarking on how inappropriate it is that Richard is involved here. These two young girls are also how we learn that the going age in this group is seemingly fifteen when Richard is pontificating about being seventeen again and they correct his assumption on their ages.

Everything comes to a head when Claire and her appropriately adult friends find Richard and Abbie asleep together on the couch he made out of his unsold books (the movie repeatedly tries to paint Richard as a harmless doofus that just needs his Manic Pixie Dream Girl to pull him out of his rut and back into glorious creativity--it is as embarrassing as it sounds). Claire rightly assumes that her husband has been having an affair with an underaged girl (because he has), kicks him out of the cottage, gets Abbie some serious counseling and moves back to the city to live the life of a successful and single surgeon.

Sorry that's not quite right, what I meant to say was that Claire takes equal ownership for the root causes of Richard having an affair with an underage girl and comes around to forgiving him, the two of them riding off into the sunset and marital bliss together... but not before Richard and Abbie share a little kiss goodbye of course, despite Richard regularly attempting to excuse his feelings for Abbie as fatherly.

Oh yeah, Ryan Reynolds and Kieran Culkin are in this movie. Kind of. They both play imaginary friends, with Ryan Reynolds as Richard's "Captain Fantastic" and Kieran Culkin as Christopher, Abbie's imaginary stalker (no I am not kidding).

Neither contribute much of anything to the film beyond Reynolds attempting to intervene when Richard is clearly preying on Abbie and gets blown off within a minute of his appearance every time lest he be Too Correct about everything.

The other "contribution" is from Culkin's character at the end of the film, where, after Christopher and Captain Fantastic have a tender conversation about letting their respective people move on with their lives, Captain Fantastic has a heartfelt last hurrah with Richard and Christopher...

Well, Abbie finds Christopher's lifeless body hanging from the ceiling in her childhood bedroom.

I don't know that I can muster up much more to say about this piece of shit. I just couldn't stop watching, I had to see if it found a way to redeem itself. Instead, it just dug deeper and deeper into self-indulgence.

Oh, I'd said I would have more to talk about with regard to the asshole (but age-appropriate) boyfriend: while the movie certainly portrays him as an awful guy that nobody would want to be around, one can't help but consider the source in this scenario: Paper Man is meant to be semi-autobiographical from a writing standpoint, as we learn definitively at the end of the movie when Richard finally settles on a name for the protagonist of his next book and peacefully taps away on his typewriter. Predictably, the character's name is Richard, so presumably we have just been watching the events of that novel unfold for the past two hours of our wasted lives. This makes it extremely difficult to take the portrayal of Abbie's age-appropriate boyfriend at face value, since Richard wants to fuck Abbie and wants us to believe he's the right man for her (again, Abbie is a child).

And that's it. Richard learns that he can have an affair with an underaged girl and all that will happen is that his marriage will emerge stronger and he will go on with life unburdened from his neuroses (because they were cured by the Manic Pixie Dream Girl).

Most of the time when I don't like a movie, I just don't like it. My feelings are lukewarm, neither here nor there; I am unmoved. It has been a while since I hated a movie like I hate Paper Man.