Sacramento (2024)
Directed by Michael Angarano
Written by Angarano and Chris Smith
Turn to any news-talk radio station, cable pop-psychology show, newspaper op-ed page, or half-serious magazine and you will hear it said: Men are in trouble. All men, perhaps, but at the very least all American men. Or most of them. They’re babies who depend on the women in their lives to finish shepherding them through the emotional development they skipped for several years of their adolescence, and meantime the women must treat them with kid gloves lest they risk damaging men’s fragile egos.
Then when they finally realize they’re fucked up — usually after they’ve blown through relationships with wives, girlfriends, partners, dates, hookups and, most tragically, their children — they must spend several years learning what they should have learned from ages 10-20. By the time they emerge from their rotting chrysalis at age 47 or so, they’re isolated. They either become bitter, having lost their youth, or they become know-it-alls who think that simply growing up is some kind of achievement.
The film “Sacramento” does not argue with this depiction; it illustrates it. The main characters are two middle-aged men with serious neuroses. Rickey (Michael Angarano) has had the luck to meet a random woman with whom he goes camping for a few days, then ghosts for a couple of years because his father has died and it fucks him up, not that there’s any evidence that he was any less fucked up before that, since he’s clearly in his mid-40s with no sign of a family or a job. Glenn (Michael Cera) is even luckier, because despite the fact that he’s lost his job as his wife is about to have a baby, his wife Rosie (Kristin Stewart) is six kinds of awesome. But Glenn is terrified of parenthood and is having a nervous breakdown more or less throughout the picture.
The premise is that having been evicted from the outpatient grief counseling program he’s been in for over a year after his father’s death, Rickey needs his “best friend” Glenn to go on a road trip with him to scatter his father’s ashes. He hoodwinks Glenn into coming, and they proceed to have cringe-worthy adventures for about 48 hours until returning to Glenn’s wife Rosie, who looks even more exhausted than she did before Glenn left. The trip has done him zero good, because the next thing he does is accompany Rickey on another trip, this time to make amends to Tallie (Maya Erskine), the woman whom he impregnated, then ghosted. Recognizing that Tallie is living hand-to-mouth, Glenn decides he’s going to save her one-year-old baby from her “neglect” and kidnaps the child.
That’s at the end of the movie. If Rickey has managed to figure out that he owes Tallie at least some childcare, Glenn has accomplished nothing. He’s just as much a mess as he is in the first scene — in fact, demonstrably worse. Viewers would be forgiven for thinking these men are irredeemable and should be dropped into a canyon. But the people I feel really sorry for are the couples who make the mistake of thinking this alleged comedy would be a good date movie. Any woman who sees this film will never go on another date with a man again.
Perhaps the only good thing about this movie is the discovery of the actress Maya Erskine as Tallie. She’s funny, expressive, and absolutely believable, and I would love to see her in something else — perhaps the TV series version of “Mr and Mrs. Smith” with Donald Glover (early 2024, on Prime Video), or the Hulu series “PEN15” (2019-21). The great Kristin Stewart, of course, needs no defending.
So what are we going to do with men?
With my then-wife Cris, I visited Argentina years ago. One of the contacts we had been given was a relative of our next-door neighbor in San Francisco. This woman lived with her husband and two grown sons and a college-age daughter in Buenos Aires. The sons were polite, friendly, confident; they were in their early to mid 20s but were clearly young adults. Their father was similarly confident, warm, humorous. None of them seemed neurotic, immature, hostile, or missing part of their emotional development.
I thought of those young men in comparison with not only the characters in “Sacramento” but those across American television, where cringe comedy is performed nightly and the allegedly adult male characters are invariably the butt of the jokes. Some manosphere bros would probably say that’s the problem — that today’s entertainment provides no healthy role models — meanwhile they lionize Republican pigs who seem to be competing for who will be judged the worst. Can you imagine what Pete Hegseth, J.D. Vance, or Matt Gaetz are like at home, swaying drunkenly before the bathroom toilet and struggling to find their tiny penises in their own underwear before they piss themselves? Can you imagine how they treat their wives or their own mothers? As for Trump and Musk, two emotional children acting out a Three Stooges farce where they’re driving a bus toward a cliff at top speed and handing the broken-off steering wheel back and forth, only the bus is the whole country — they are the latest men to demonstrate the maxim that absolute power corrupts absolutely. I’m sure we’ll all have a good laugh at that as we drown in rivers swollen by catastrophic storms or die in a pandemic that could have been stopped by the drugs scientists are no longer perfecting. Yes, “Sacramento” is a comedy! God help us.