"Momma's Man": A subtle story of regression, retreat and unresolved youth

Very little is spelled out for the audience in Azazel Jacobs' drama "Momma's Man." Yet a discerning viewer can pick up so much about the unspoken dilemma of the film's central character, a 30ish Los Angeles man named Mikey (Matt Boren), just by watching the way he lumbers through the cluttered Manhattan loft in which he grew up.

Visiting his parents (played by experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs and artist Flo Jacobs, Azazel's father and mother), Mikey slowly succumbs to an enervating depression causing him to escape from his responsibilities into comforting regression. The reasons for this are never clearly expressed, and we watch Mikey dig in for a long break from life one lie at a time.

He tells his folks that his wife, Laura (Dana Varon), is cheating on him, and tells Laura that his extended stay is due to airline troubles. Eventually he stops giving excuses at all.

Males in various stages of prolonged adolescence are a staple of popular comedies. But the emotional dismantling of a grown man, especially one who returns to the nest with almost paralyzing desperation, isn't pretty. Digging through the artifacts of his younger years, Mikey relives unresolved, adolescent anger and rediscovers such comforts as comic books and a narrow view of the street below his bedroom.

Writer-director Jacobs is one of those rare filmmakers who forgoes conventional narrative in order to tell a story through the visual details of a world and the behavior of characters within it. Toward that end, the most interesting and telling aspect of the film is how ill-fitting the rather down-to-earth Mikey seems within the ocean of cultural debris that takes up so much of the loft's space.

While his loving, avant-garde parents are clearly quite at home squeezed into a warehouse overwhelmed by stored objects, one quietly gets the feeling Mikey had to carve out some kind of lonely life there for himself. Perhaps it's no wonder he came back, looking for his reflection.

Tom Keogh: tomwkeogh@yahoo.com