An Insider Mocks the Endless Progressive Guilt Trip

By Kyle Smith

Sunday, January 23, 2022

 

An intensely determined social worker played by Julianne Moore drives to work listening to equally intense classical music suggesting her utter, lifelong focus on a dramatic struggle for social justice. Then the camera pulls back to reveal the car she’s in: a pathetic, absurd, lawnmower-sized demi-car.

 

That’s the kind of perfect juxtaposition — funny, cutting, woefully accurate — that characterizes every smartly-designed scene in When You Finish Saving the World, the sly directorial debut of actor-writer Jesse Eisenberg. Eisenberg (who also wrote the movie, which began as a podcast) politely but devastatingly lampoons the sorts of people he grew up with and works among. And the Sundance Film Festival (where slick Beverly Hills dealmakers in $1,500 ski jackets solemnly take part in “land acknowledgment” ceremonies to parade their guilt about being the heirs of colonialism) is the perfect showcase for the film. Sundance (which is a virtual fest this year) has always hosted an intriguing balance of ruthless Hollywood ambition and silly liberal self-scourging. It can only benefit from taking in a bit of satiric blasphemy about its audience’s culture and politics.

 

When You Finish Saving the World zeroes in on the follies of progressive activists and agrees with Dickens (in his takedown of the “telescopic philanthropy” of Mrs. Jellyby) that they get into social justice because they can’t stand what they see when they look across the breakfast table. Evelyn (Moore) is a dreary, dry, careworn, humorless manager of a shelter for battered women in Indiana who barely knows her own employees or her teen son Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard), a Justin Bieber wannabe who is building a career online as a sensitive folksinger. (He keeps reminding people he has 20,000 followers, most of them girls in Asia.)

 

As played perfectly by Wolfhard, Ziggy, though cute, is a bit dim, and he senses he’s in over his head when he tries to draw the attention of a pretty classmate named Lila (Alisha Boe) who is part of a hilariously obtuse collective of young Communists who meet in a darkened room at a strip mall to regale one another with revolutionary slam poetry and anti-capitalist marionette skits. Lila bleeds with indignation for the plight of the oppressed peoples of the Marshall Islands, so Ziggy tries to dress up his act with some lefty outrage. Similar scenarios centered on equally abstract concerns must be taking place in virtually every high school and college across the land; the roots of wokeness can be as simple as wanting to date someone.

 

Meanwhile, Ziggy’s mom is so wrapped up in helping strangers who don’t necessarily want her advice that she (as well as Ziggy) forgets about a career-achievement ceremony honoring her husband, a professor. The dad (Jay O. Sanders) is awful too, though, so he earns no sympathy: He’s the kind of guy who warns his son, “It’s incredibly unethical — white people playing blues music. Did you ever read Amiri Baraka?”

 

Disappointed by the apolitical nature of her son, whom she raised to be some kind of protest baby by teaching him about the forgotten causes of her youth, Evelyn tries to make a substitute son out of a teen named Kyle (Billy Bryk) who lives at her shelter. Kyle is exactly the kind of wet clay she thinks she can mold into a professional guilt-tripper such as herself. The first step on this magical journey, she assumes, must be . . . Oberlin. She immediately starts pulling strings.

 

Avoiding anything like the kind of grinding, cliché-strewn broad satire that Hollywood loves to reward (see, for instance, Don’t Look Up), Eisenberg keeps the whole movie dry and matter-of-fact, letting this cast of amusingly misguided people simply go about their lives as blind to their own flaws as you would expect professional progressives to be. In Moore’s character, Eisenberg pinpoints the toxic liberal solipsism and the exhausting need to be disappointed by everything that have combined to create her gray, joyless existence. When she hears her son is studying To Kill a Mockingbird in school, she sighs heavily and says, “It’s always Harper Lee, never Toni Morrison.”

 

Most surprising, and most welcome, about the film is that it suggests a lifetime in car repair, especially if the garage is being run by someone in one’s own family, is a more honorable and satisfying choice than becoming yet another hand-wringing Oberlin prog determined to ride to the rescue of society’s many victims. That the sturdy, practical Kyle refuses to play the victimology game suggests he’s the one character in this film who doesn’t need help. Bravo to him, and to Eisenberg.