Ezra
I served as a juror for the Florida Film Festival last month, working in the Narrative Feature category. Of all the movies I saw and there were some good ones perhaps the most interesting pair was “Hellbent for Boogie,” directed by Vito Trupiano, and “Ezra,” directed by Tony Goldwyn from a screenplay by Tony Spiridakis. Each movie had its charms, but both were opaque to me.
“Hellbent on Boogie” tells the story of an autistic teenager named Max (Alyx Ruibal), who is homeschooled by her mother and kept in isolation from other kids. Max’s representation of neurodivergence is genuinely authentic; it’s not often you find such honesty in characters with autism in movies like this one. That’s probably because Ruibal herself is on the spectrum, which makes her performance even more impressive doubly so given that this is her first acting gig.
Neurodivergence has always been tricky territory for film, and while most movies about it mean well, very few get it right. “Hellbent on Boogie,” I think, pushes us closer to where we need to be with these stories. And so does “Ezra.”
Bobby Cannavale stars as Max, a former comedy writer turned stand-up comedian whose agent (Whoopi Goldberg) informs him that he has lost too many jobs due to his volatile temper and erratic behavior (apparently he once punched Conan O’Brien in the balls). Things are also not great at home. Max and his ex-wife Jenna (Rose Byrne) are raising their 10 year old son Ezra (William Fitzgerald), who has autism. He social worker and principal recommend that Ezra be placed in a special school because he’s disruptive; Jenna agrees with them about what needs to happen next for their child’s education/socialization whereas Max does not.
He flips out at one of his gigs and lands in jail, where he’s bailed out by his father Stan (Robert De Niro), a former chef who now works as a doorman. Ezra is put on heavy meds. Max makes a desperate move to save him. The rest of the movie is them Max, Ezra, Jenna and Stan dealing with it as Max prepares for an audition for Jimmy Kimmel out West that could change everything for him.
Here’s the thing: That whole audition for Jimmy Kimmel bit feels tacked on to what is otherwise a very strong family drama. In some sense, I know it’s meant to be the incident that forces Max’s hand; the motivation “makes sense.” But the family relationships in this film are so viscerally rendered that they’re almost tangible you can reach out and touch them while the audition feels like just another cliche pasted over real life.
The family here is presented with rare nuance: Nobody’s a villain. Everyone’s exhausted from worry and upset. Nobody knows what to do. Ezra is being pulled in different directions, he doesn’t want anyone taking him away from the “normal” kids and putting him on medication when all he wants is to see if his dad can get him tickets to Disneyland so they can ride Space Mountain together.
Fitzgerald gives an astonishingly unselfconscious performance as Ezra; like Ruibal, he has never acted before, but you’d never know it from watching this movie. He gets so much space in which to work, and Cannavale, Byrne and De Niro are all so generous with their scenes opposite him that everything feels entirely real there isn’t an ounce of artifice or calculation anywhere in this film.
Ezra himself is such a fully realized character: He can’t bear to be touched; speaks mostly through movie quotes (his favorite seems to be “The Princess Bride”), is keenly aware of everything that’s happening to him, and, perhaps most crucially, absorbs every ounce of his parents’ anxiety.
Cannavale is incredibly sad because Max loves his son so much and always lets him down. He loses his temper when he should be more calm. He can be very scary. There are times when Max’s love for Ezra burns so bright you can almost feel how much it physically pains him not to be able to hold his son in his arms. Byrne, playing Jenna, looks tired. This is not a control freak witch of a mother; we understand why she’s concerned about Max’s behavior, and that understanding means everything here. And then there is De Niro, as the plain-spoken Stan, who breaks your heart just continuously, but especially in a late in the game moment where he acknowledges haltingly, painfully all the ways he failed as a father to Max. De Niro goes deep on this one; it’s devastating. Vera Farmiga and Rainn Wilson show up at different points as old friends of Max’s trying to help out.
Spiridakis has talked about how he wrote the script based on his own experiences as the father of an autistic child and how at some point he had to let go of the idea that he could “fix” his boy. There was never any question of hiring a neurotypical kid to play Ezra (and young artist Sawyer Nunes is fantastic in this role), and they made sure to have neurodivergent people involved in the making of the film both in front of and behind the camera and they screened it with different groups for feedback. All that work shows, “Ezra” understands what it wants to say and knows how best to say it.
The moments don’t grate like they usually do in movies like this, if anything there are scenes here that let go too soon or don’t quite earn their keep emotionally speaking until later on when something happens where you’re like “oh OK I guess we needed to know that.” But it’s mainly because the source material feels honest. Ezra has a quiet encounter with a girl who lets him pet her horse, and it’s lovely. Cannavale has one big blowout scene with Fitzgerald where all the tension and worry finally come out, and it is devastating these two are so good together. You get invested in these people.
The story of a struggling stand-up comic racing across the country for the Audition That Could Change Everything is from another movie entirely, but here it all works as part of for lack of a better term an ensemble piece. The whole movie is greater than any individual performance or moment; “Ezra” will haunt you not just for what it has to say about Max and his love for his son, but also about how people worry themselves into corners where they have no choice but to act on their worst instincts. It’s worth watching.
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