7) Jason Reitman
Jason Reitman’s ascent as a filmmaker was something to envy. Bearing the family name but also the talent and the storytelling ability of his father, Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman, Jason made three tricky comedy-dramas with a rather strange character as their hook: a smug lobbyist for the tobacco industry, a narcissistic pregnant teenager and a cold corporate ‘downsizer.’ Despite these offbeat characters, Thank You for Smoking, Juno and Up in the Air were three sharply observed, beautifully written, tremendously acted films that captured enough truth about the current zeitgeist to make its director one to watch.
However, as quickly as his career catapulted, it collapsed. While still a good director of actors even if the screenplay is not up to par, Reitman misplayed his hand with the harsh and redundant Young Adult (good performances from Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt notwithstanding) and the dopey, contrived Labor Day (despite strong turns from Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin). His latest venture, Men, Women & Children, is giving the director the worst reviews of his career. We Got This Covered’s Sam Woolf noted it was a simplistic ensemble drama that veered “dangerously close to the territory of after-school special.”
His recent films have been a major step back for a man once deemed a major talent. Perhaps he needs to choose better material – his last two films were adaptations of novels that did not need the big screen – or take some advice from his father. When discussing Labor Day at the Toronto Film Festival in 2014, he had this to say:
“I’ve done more work on that movie than I’ve ever done on a movie. I’m proud of it. And then it doesn’t land and then you realize, oh, this was a misguided effort, for whatever reason. My dad said something so smart to me. He does all the time, but he said, “I was watching ‘Labor Day’ again, it just struck me all of a sudden that you weren’t making a movie about a man and a women, you were making a movie about a kid,” … and Paramount marketed a movie about a man and a woman and everyone wrote about a movie about a man and a woman and it all became this kind of romance. And he said, “You really didn’t care about the romance, did you?” And I said, “No, the romance really was a B plotline to this kid.” So, if I somehow would have focused the movie on the kid? I don’t know. When a band plays a song outside of their genre, there’s a bit of, “Can you please go back to playing the songs we like?”
