For Rent: Solitary Man

Michael Douglas floats through Solitary Man in the role of Ben Kalmen, a once successful car dealer whose personal and professional lives fall apart after a medical diagnosis. The movie is a succession of scenes of Ben screwing up and then getting called on it, from the seduction of his girlfriend's daughter (Imogen Poots) to his failure to be a reliable presence in the life of his grandson. Playing an old seducer isn't a stretch for Douglas; he even takes a run at Olivia Thirlby while attending a college party. Yet Ben seems unruffled by the bottoms he hits on the way down and it's a little hard to buy Douglas as a man with no job prospects about to be cut off by his daughter (Jenna Fischer). Although Douglas's scenes with Danny DeVito have a relaxed fellow feeling that Ben doesn't get to display in the rest of the movie, I'm not sure that I thought Ben would be pals with a guy who owns the pizza joint in the town where Ben went to college. Susan Sarandon and Mary-Louise Parker float around but don't have time to add much, and directors Brian Koppelman and David Levien don't know where to go once they let us know that Ben is at a turning point. Solitary Man wants to take Ben and us to the edge, but it winds up being too slick for its own good.