The Adults will resonate with anyone who’s ever left home – to go to college, take a job, whatever – flown the parental nest, and then started returning periodically on visits that are more duty than pleasure.
Eric, played by Michael Cera at a level of diffidence that’s very Michael Cera, is the guy back in town and trying to duck obligations to old friends and family by playing one off against the other. He’d love to come and see the new baby of one set of friends but he’s seeing his sisters that night. To the sisters he hands out the same bullshit excuse but flipped – he’s seeing the baby so they’re not going to get as much of him as they hoped.
What Eric does want to do is play poker, though even his old poker buddy Dennis (Wavyy Jonez, who played The Notorious B.I.G in the TV show Unsolved) doesn’t seem overjoyed to see him. So play poker he does. And loses. Which encourages him to stay one more night, to win the money back. Which he does. Which encourages yet another prolongation. And so on…
Everyone seems as underwhelmed to see Eric as Eric is to be back, in fact, apart from his younger sister, Maggie (Sophia Lillis), whose enthusiasm has to be met with more enthusiasm otherwise it would be seen as a snub. Eric, we sense, would rather not get into snub territory – he wants a clean in and out and no emotional stuff whatsover. But the longer the poker game encourages him to hang around, the more exposed Eric is to the possibility that he’s going to get snagged on something.
Films about people returning to their small home town tend to go in one direction, and The Adults is no exception. Eric is going to learn a lesson or two about the simple things in life, in this case affection – from friends but most of all family. But what makes this different is that this isn’t a run past the usual stopping-off points. Dustin Guy Defa, who wrote and directed, appears to be writing from first-hand experience.
It’s a film full of quirks and idiosyncracy, like the specific way that Eric and sisters Hannah and Maggie revert to childish type and start interacting with each other the way they used to. There is the cute stuff, like the threesome performing together the silly songs they made up as kids (written by Cera, apparently). Then there is the more passive aggressive stuff, like when they adopt funny voices (Marge Simpson’s is popular) to say things to each other they’d struggle with as “themselves”.
Are they Adults at all? Is anyone in that situation? The fact of their mother’s death – recently enough for it still to hurt – hangs in the background like something unspoken. Which is this film’s real strength, its script full of unvoiced injury and old grudges revived by new promises broken. People saying one thing and meaning another. The attempt to keep things on an even keel when emotions are roiling beneath.
The performances are great. Cera reminds us he’s still around. Where has he been? Apart from his extended cameos (a vansihingly small part in Barbie, most recently) and voiceovers on animations, he seems to have gone missing in action. But he’s all here, fully present, alongside Hannah Gross, wrestling with the hardest role, of the antsy sister least able to express herself. And the film’s standout, Sophia Lillis, whose every moment on screen is magnetic.
They are a plausible sibling trio in a very plausible film whose best moments are its oddest, like the emotional catharsis towards the end when the three of them do goofy dances to the Men at Work song Overkill, one of those “it’s right because it’s right” choices that make the film refreshing and keep it honest.
The Adults – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
