Do you buy Andrew Garfield as an adult? I don’t know that I do. He’s 31 years old, I know that academically, but I don’t think I really know that. Because when I see Garfield, I don’t think “grown ass man”. He’s a Forever Child, which is why it’s totally believable for him to be playing Peter Parker in the Spider-Man movies—he looks like he should still be in college. It works for Spider-Man, but his Forever Child-ness is throwing me for a loop in the first clip from Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes.
The film is premiering at the Venice Film Festival, and it’s about a man (Garfield) whose family is evicted from their home by a ruthless real estate broker played by Michael Shannon. In order to get his home back, the man agrees to work for the broker, evicting other families in turn. It sounds intense and morally complicated, and Bahrani is a good filmmaker whose been inching toward the mainstream for the last several years. There’s a lot of promise in this film, and a lot of people are curious to see what Bahrani can do with a name cast at his disposal. The first clip is online:
Do you see what’s throwing me? I don’t buy that Andrew Garfield and Laura Dern are married. I don’t buy that he is old enough to be married, let alone old enough to be the father of a child that is what—10? And it’s not a failure on his part as an actor—he’s a good actor and nothing he’s doing is scanning as bad, per se. It’s just that he doesn’t fit. Not in this family scene, anyway. Perhaps the other part of the movie, where he’s working with Shannon and engaging in moral reflection, maybe that part will click better. Because as it is, I’m kind of…confused.
