Actress Rosemarie DeWitt and her husband, actor Ron Livingston, have a daughter who turns 2 in the spring. “So we’re a ways from dealing with all this,” DeWitt says in a hotel room during the Toronto International Film Festival.
“All this” is the ring of online hell depicted in “Men, Women & Children,” director Jason Reitman’s cautionary tale about contemporary digital addictions and temptations and how they corrode our instincts for genuine intimacy.
DeWitt, 42, recalls talking with Reitman about how “years ago you’d talk to your kids about the birds and the bees. Then it was: ‘Be sure to use a condom.’ Now it’s: ‘Be careful what you type in the Google line, because you might go down a rabbit hole no one can pull you out of.'”
Reitman’s film has drawn mostly mixed-to-negative reviews since its Toronto film festival bow last month, with many citing the film’s alarmist tone as excessive. Others can’t help but find a way into the various storylines sharing the running time.
“For me,” says DeWitt, who was born in Flushing, N.Y., “the heartbreaking elements are there. There’s the character (her character’s son, played by Travis Tope) who has seen so much online pornography he’s unable to get an erection when he loses his virginity. That, juxtaposed against the central love story, that’s really powerful, I think.
“There’s a line that’s no longer in the movie, actually, part of the Emma Thompson narration, when she talks about Ansel Elgort’s character smelling ‘like dryer sheets.’ I remember that, being 16, putting my face in my boyfriend’s chest and smelling Downy. We’re talking about all this very scary new technology, but in the end you still hug people. You still fall in love. But now there’s this other thing, so instead of opening up a Playboy magazine because of your newfound curiosity, you find this other stuff you can’t comprehend.”
She pauses. “So how do we protect our children without overprotecting them?”
DeWitt spent 10 days last January filming her scenes, on the set in Austin, Texas. She remembers it being “a quieter, more thoughtful” shoot than usual. “Every scene was an intimate scene, even if you were showing how disconnected you were.”
Roughly half of her scenes were filmed with Dennis Haysbert, who plays the DeWitt character’s secret paramour. (They meet online.) The other primary encounters were with Adam Sandler, who plays her husband. She notes that two storylines in “Men, Women & Children” got cut out of the final edit. Enough was enough, Reitman figured.
Enough is enough is exactly what DeWitt finds finds herself saying when she realizes she’s spent a little too much time with a smartphone in her hand.
“I find myself going over to my in-laws, and my daughter is right there, but somehow I’m compelled to show them a video of her yesterday and how cute she was with spaghetti in her hair. And she’s sitting right in front of us. You go to a music venue — who doesn’t have an iPhone up in the air? Right? I mean, do you feel more anxious and keyed-up, generally?”
Because of the hours we spend texting, Googling, pinging? Yes, I say. “Me too,” she says. And that’s really scary. Because the next generation is 10 times more anxious and keyed-up than we are.”
It has been only six years since DeWitt’s film breakthrough, director Jonathan Demme’s “Rachel Getting Married,” got her noticed by a wider circle of audiences and industry players. In digital terms that’s two epochs plus a lifetime ago.
Recently DeWitt’s husband made a movie with Chicago-based Joe Swanberg, “Drinking Buddies.” More recently, DeWitt is co-starring with Jake Johnson in Swanberg’s upcoming project, “Digging for Fire,” which continues Swanberg’s winning streak when it comes to casting formidable ensembles up for some on-camera improvisation. “Digging for Fire” also stars Sam Rockwell, Orlando Bloom, Anna Kendrick, Chris Messina and Jenny Slate. DeWitt also recently shot a “Poltergeist” reboot, to be released in summer, also co-starring Rockwell.
DeWitt wonders if her near future might involve optioning material with herself or others in mind, to “take a greater role in the storytelling collaboration.” Sometimes, she says, it’s a matter of simply speaking up. She recalls that one day on the “Poltergeist” set, when screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire was around (he’s staged-trained, as is DeWitt), she expressed her weariness with having to ask Rockwell’s character for help over and over. “When you’re playing someone’s wife,” she says, smiling, “you don’t really want to ask for help one more time. But you know? David listened.”
“Men, Women & Children” opens Friday.
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