‘When You Finish Saving the World’ Review: Jesse Eisenberg’s Feature Directorial Debut is Muddled
While When You Finish Saving the World has interesting ideas and good performances, the film can’t help but feel smug especially with how Eisenberg casts Finn Wolfhard as himself.
Julianne Moore is the best part of Jesse Eisenberg’s When You Finish Saving the World. Based on Eisenberg’s 2020 audio drama of the same name, the actor’s feature directorial debut sees Moore play Evelyn, who runs a domestic abuse survivor shelter. She becomes obsessed with helping Kyle (Billy Bryk), who seems to have a comfortable life working at his father’s body shop while attending school. But Kyle doesn’t need help — her mother does. However, Evelyn thinks she is doing the right thing by consistently tending to him and starts getting worried at every minute detail.
Those parts, peppered through the film’s brisk 88-minute runtime, are extremely entertaining. Moore plays Evelyn in the same vein as a psychopath - her deadpan delivery of some of the film’s funniest lines is downright creepy, but her tendency to want to control everything is so utterly fascinating to watch. It’s a testament to how talented and versatile an actor Moore is. No other performer could’ve pulled off the character as she did, and she keeps the audience’s eyes glued to the screen in the process. It’s perhaps the solitary reason why anyone should watch When You Finish Saving the World and why the movie isn’t a complete disaster. Coupled with intriguing music patterns from Emile Mosseri and compelling visual language from cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, the film is somewhat watchable.
It’s everything else that feels semi-problematic. Whenever the film focuses on Evelyn’s son, Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard), he’s essentially a teenaged version of Jesse Eisenberg - fast-talking, making odd noises and creating ticks between his lines, and attempting humour in a wry manner that doesn’t quite land. It simply put… it doesn’t work. Wolfhard is a talented actor, and he is pretty good here, regardless of what he is directed to do. He can be good in virtually anything, and he’s proven himself capable over the years on Stranger Things and in the It franchise. But his character is painstakingly annoying. The only thing Ziggy is obsessed with is his base on a fictitious streaming software in which he live streams his original songs to thousands of virtual fans.
He’s interested in Lila (Alisha Boe), a girl in her cohort who isn’t afraid of being political. He thinks that by interesting himself in politics or at least appearing semi-interested in what is currently going on in the political sphere, he will gain her attention and befriend her (it’s become clear that Ziggy has no friends, apart from his virtual fanbase). But what he does is so utterly selfish and eye-rolling that the only thing you’ll feel by the end of it is utter smugness and contempt.
It is doubtful that anyone would call Eisenberg a smug actor, but he’s not necessarily everyone’s favorite. Yes, he’s been in good movies like The Social Network and Zombieland, but he’s had a myriad of bad roles over the years, and they’re beginning to outweigh the good ones. Interestingly, as a filmmaker, it seems that his sole intent for When You Finish Saving the World is to make their characters so irredeemable and irritating that they come off as contemptuous instead of representing some form of hope between the two characters. He teases it at the end, but not enough to warrant sympathy from the audience.
It’s only because of Moore that When You Finish Saving the World is watchable. Without her presence, Eisenberg’s adaptation fails miserably. Moore is so good at playing someone you love to dislike that she steals the entire picture for herself. It’s a shame that virtually everything else feels smug and not as compelling as Moore's weird, almost horror-tone-like screen presence.