Photo Credit: Bleecker Street (via YouTube)
Ezra is not the heartwarming comedy-drama it thinks it is. It’s easy to tell what this movie is aiming for. This is a movie about stand-up comedian Max Brandel (Bobby Cannavale), who raises his autistic son, Ezra (William Fitzgerald). When he finds out his son is going to be placed into a school for autistic children, he takes his child and drives him across the country in what is supposed to be an inspiring, heartfelt road movie about the lengths a parent will go for their child. On the surface, this isn’t the worst idea for a film like this, but the execution is slightly baffling.
At first, the movie gives us the premise as promised. We have our stand-up offering a few jokes about his personal life. There are a few laughs at the beginning and in the rest of the film, particularly from Max’s father, Stan (Robert De Niro). But the issue with a movie like Ezra is the fact that it’s dealing with a very serious subject matter. Raising an autistic child comes with a very unique set of challenges, and this movie needs to deal with that in a serious matter. However, there needs to be a few funny moments, and that’s where characters like Stan come into play. It’s always fun to see De Niro use his naturally threatening presence for laughs, like in Meet the Parents. It works well here too.
It’s interesting to see De Niro, a primarily dramatic actor, doing the comedic heavy-lifting while Rose Byrne, the actress known for comedies like Bridesmaids, Neighbors, and Spy, does the drama. She plays Jenna, Max’s ex-wife, who is also helping raise their child. From the start, there is a strange way in which everything is written. Jenna cares deeply for Ezra and wants the best for him, as does Max. But Max is much more confrontational, getting angry when an employee at the school recommends putting his son on medication. The scene culminates in Max physically assaulting the employee, leading him to be arrested and getting a restraining order from his son.
When Max finds out that Ezra will be sent to a school designed for kids with autism, he breaks his restraining order and puts Ezra in a car, driving him out of town. This is ridiculous. The protagonist is quite literally a criminal kidnapping his child. When Jenna finds out what Max did, she is reasonably mortified. The whole time, I kept thinking about how differently we would feel about this story if Jenna were the main character. A woman’s ex-husband, recently released from prison for violent crime, kidnaps their autistic son and drives him across the country. You don’t even have to change any of the story; this movie has the exact plot beats of a horror thriller.
And yet, Ezra is so dedicated to presenting Max as the good guy. While nobody can deny that Max has the best intentions for his son and cares deeply about him, the actions he performs are enough to traumatize his son for life. There’s a scene in the middle where Max takes Ezra to a stand-up comedy bar at midnight. When someone confronts Max about how Ezra is clearly not having fun in this adult-oriented environment, Max gets into a physical fight with the stranger. Max is clearly prone to violence and is a danger to the people near him. But sure, he’s supposed to be a loving father that we side with.
In a later scene, Max sees police cars ahead of him. Worried that they will recognize him (because Max’s horrifying crimes have reached national news), he drives his son deep into the woods on bumpy terrain, terrifying Ezra to the point where he runs out of the car. At this point, Max gets out of the car and realizes that he has lost his child in the woods in the middle of nowhere. He chases and eventually finds Ezra. At this point, it becomes crystal clear that Ezra does not want to be on this road trip. This would be a heartwarming movie if Ezra was having an incredible time and he was in genuine danger at home. But Ezra is in monumental danger during the movie from a father who has no clue how to take care of him.
During this scene, Max continuously tells Ezra, “You’re my superhero.” Ezra tearfully screams back, “I’m not a superhero! I’m your son!” If that doesn’t scream the major issue with this movie, I don’t know what does. Max never takes into account what his child wants or needs throughout the whole movie. Max has his own idea of what he wants from his kid, and he projects it onto Ezra. Although Max accepts his child’s autism, he refuses to put him in a school or take medication that might actually be beneficial to him. It would be different if Max had done the research and realized the negative effects these things could have on Ezra. But Max solely operates on the emotions that he has about his child, not on any logical reason.
In fact, during this same scene, Ezra yells, “Don’t hit me!” This poor child is traumatized and is so genuinely afraid of his father. To drill this point home, Max later calls his father and admits that he almost hit his son. If you come so close to physically abusing your child that you need to call your father to talk you out of it, you’re not a father who is fit to be making these decisions for your kid. How is this kid going to grow up? He’s forever going to look back at the time that his father took him out of bed at night, put him into a car, and drove him across the country while the authorities were after them. This is a horrifying thing to implicate a child into. And what makes it worse is the fact that the movie still paints Max in a sympathetic light.
Raising children with autism is a serious matter that parents go through every day. Writer Tony Spiridakis drew from his own experiences raising a child on the spectrum. However, I believe it’s irresponsible to write a movie on this topic where the parent is a borderline sociopath committing a felony and traumatizing his child. You can show imperfect parents who feel in over their heads when raising autistic kids, and this movie does show the real hardships that can come from it. But the fact that Ezra is built around a horrible crime does not feel like the right way to approach a subject matter like this.
Furthermore, since a road movie often needs the characters to have a destination, this movie decides to have Max book a stand-up gig on Jimmy Kimmel Live! I do not buy that in the slightest. If you watch Max’s stand-up comedy sets in the movie, they’re not very funny. Early on, he says that he isn’t there to tell jokes; he tells stories. There’s a scene where he is so overcome by the sadness that comes from his child’s fate that he starts talking about it onstage, and he exits, depressed. That’s the sign of a terrible performer. An entertainer with any shot of success must be able to deliver for a crowd despite everything going on in their life. Max bombs onstage, and this movie expects us to believe that he booked a gig on one of the most well-known late-night talk shows of all time.
And there are some more scenes that genuinely feel like a writer out of touch with reality. When Jenna gets an AMBER alert sent out about what her husband did, it becomes this major thing that becomes a point of concern. Firstly, AMBER alerts are mainly just loud, shrill noises for people to turn off and move on with their lives. Secondly, Jenna is completely in the right to do this. They make it seem like having the authorities go after Ezra and putting out an AMBER alert is going to traumatize the kid; no, getting kidnapped by your father is the real trauma.
There are shining moments in this movie. It can be funny when it wants to be. Rainn Wilson is a delight in nearly everything he’s in, and he shares at least one laugh-out-loud moment with De Niro. Fitzgerald, the actor who plays the titular character and has autism in real life, is phenomenal. All the performances are great, but this is one of the most ethically problematic movies I’ve seen in a while. It’s a movie about raising an autistic child where the father does not have the slightest clue how to raise an autistic child. The good intentions are there, but by the end of it, the parenting in this movie is so wildly irresponsible that I couldn’t get behind it. And the ending ties everything up way too quickly and neatly, lacking in emotional resonance and feeling quite unrealistic. It also feels as if the only thing Max’s road trip achieved was torturing his child.
It’s superficially a fine movie. The performances, cinematography, and pacing are all completely acceptable. But once you think further about the implications, Ezra becomes an absolute misfire.
SCORE: 4/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 4 equates to “Poor.” The negatives outweigh the positive aspects making it a struggle to get through.
Disclosure: ComingSoon attended the New York premiere for our Ezra review.
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