There’s not much plot to Momma’s Man. A pudgy, balding sad
sack of a man named Mikey (Matt Boren), seemingly still panicked from
the birth of his first child, visits his parents’ home in New York City
and refuses to leave. It sounds like an underbaked Will Ferrell bomb,
but Momma’s Man actually more closely resembles 2006’s Old
Joy—it certainly shares that film’s patient pacing and
oblique sentimentality—or the funny, pathetic sadness of a Chris
Ware cartoon.
The movie has a lot of gimmick to swallow. Writer-director Azazel
Jacobs has cast his own mother and father as Mikey’s parents, and most
of the film is set in the apartment that Jacobs himself grew up in. But
it works in just about every way: The Jacobses’ cramped apartment,
packed to the rafters with junk, becomes just about the second most
important character in the movie. As Mikey plows through the boxes of
his childhood mementos, old notebooks, and musical instruments that
would have been trashed long ago in a normal household, Tobias Datum’s
cinematography manages to turn what could easily look like a cramped
garbage dump into a weird kingdom of undiscovered treasures.
There are missteps here and there—Dana Varon, as Mikey’s wife,
is a bit too amateurish for the film, and Mikey’s emotional transition
could have been left a little vaguer—but everything comes
together, somehow, in a very satisfying way. Mikey’s friend Dante
(Piero Arcilesi) has a musical moment that is one of the funniest,
saddest scenes I’ve seen in a movie all year, and Mikey’s attempts to
leave his parents’ apartment crescendo in a slapsticky moment that
feels totally earned.