The Sundance Film Festival provides some of the most unique and exciting films of any calendar year. One of my most anticipated films this year was When You Finish Saving The World, the directorial debut of Academy Award winner Jesse Eisenberg.
With Eisenberg behind the camera and Academy Award winner Julianne Moore & Finn Wolfhard starring, it was hard to imagine a film that wouldn’t meet but surpass expectations. Unfortunately, that was not the case as When You Finish Saving The World fails to connect similarly to its unlikeable leads.
The film tells the story of Evelyn (Moore) and Ziggy (Wolfhard), a mother and son whose unique personalities lead to a failure to connect. While Evelyn has an established career helping others at a shelter, Ziggy is quite self-observed as a “social media influencer” in the making. Roger (Jay O. Sanders), Evelyn’s husband and Ziggy’s father, is in the middle of the middling mother-son dynamic. Roger offers indifference and frustration as sort of an avatar for cinephiles watching in frustration with the film’s leads.
Eisenberg’s vision works best in examining social media prominence and its effect on today’s generation and not so much behind the camera. However, despite the film being quite unlikeable, Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard offer satisfyingly solid performances that ultimately are wasted with the film’s lack of focus and emotional stakes.
On the surface, these performances should aid a film dealing with the angst of social media influencing and a tumultuous mother-son dynamic. However, that is not the case here. In a movie where a mother and son are on different wavelengths, Eisenberg’s film keeps its audience at a distance from genuinely caring for its characters. Neither Evelyn nor Ziggy offer a likability factor that would lead us to invest in them and, in turn, leads to an uninteresting and, at times, dull film.
If When You Finish Saving The World showed cinephiles anything, it’s glimpses of potential for Jesse Eisenberg behind the camera. Regarding actor-turned-director debuts, it’s certainly not on the bottom tier of debuts. But, it’s undoubtedly one of the most disappointing. A film takes its 88-minute runtime and makes cinephiles run in circles throughout and never really has anything substantial to say when reaching the finish line.
