In addition to playing on Douglas's on- and off-screen reputation as a one-time womanizer (and, more spuriously, a sex addict), director Brian Koppelman (who also wrote the script and shares his directing credit with David Levien) appropriates the Gekko effect to infuse the character of Ben Kalmen (Douglas), a fallen New York businessman, with extra-cinematic resonance. A car dealership mogul with schmooze to spare, high-flying Ben is diagnosed with a sketchy heart situation at the beginning of the film. Rather than acquiescing to further testing, Ben is cued to drop his pants and begin a steady course of heart-taxing, compulsive, near-anonymous sex.
Although it is unclear until later in the film when he divorced his implausibly sanguine wife (Susan Sarandon), we're meant to believe that it is this minor health scare that caused Ben, in his mid-50s, to dissolve his marriage and flush his career down the drain with a reckless (and illegal) move to boost profits. Six and a half years into this collision course with his own mortality, we join Ben on a playground, where he's begging his daughter, Susan (Jenna Fischer), not to refer to him -- at least within earshot of the trashy blond by the monkey bars -- as "Dad."
The first problem with this scenario is that Douglas plays the sociopathic letch too well for us to accept Ben's behavior as anything other than congenital. No longer "Dad," nor a husband or a successful businessman, Ben is also not comfortable in the role of kept boyfriend to an Upper East Side princess, played by Mary Louise Parker. It's only a matter of time before he seduces her 18-year-old daughter, an affected seductress played by Imogen Poots, blowing yet another business deal in the process.
Was it worth it? Yes it was, says Ben. A strict, unrepentant, and woefully verbose sensualist, his baseline attitudes and behaviors are worthy of contempt, although he occasionally plunges below and peeks slightly above that line, for variety's sake. The film is structured to showcase these meager fluctuations: Koppelman sets up scene after highly conversational scene as opportunities for Ben to hold forth on his theories about human -- and specifically sexual -- relationships, which he has reduced to highly technical transactions. A veteran of the car lot, he fancies himself a pocket anthropologist, and he lays his skewed wisdom on anyone who wanders into his sights, most memorably a shy college sophomore played by Jesse Eisenberg.
While these scenes are often highly watchable in themselves -- often on the strength of a "he did not just say that" crude factor, as when Ben rhapsodizes to his daughter about the sexual responsiveness of 18-year-old bodies -- as a character study Solitary Man, like Ben, has no center. What he amounts to is a pretty consistent set of attitudes and behaviors which, while shocking, are not all that interesting. Who is this talking cliché, really? Is he being held captive by an idea of himself or is this what true freedom looks like for him? Koppelman attempts to retrofit Ben into a more sculpted, redemptive arc, but the final act feels forced. Outside perspective on Ben is diffused as well. There are simply too many characters (Danny DeVito appears as an old pal as well) and too little time for a meaningful angle on him to develop.
Lithe and smug as ever at 65, Douglas is game -- maybe a little too game -- whether shit-talking a co-ed, whispering crazy dirty nothings to his barely legal charge or waxing wistful about his fear of becoming invisible to the opposite sex. More aphoristic than explorative, Solitary Man takes for granted the audience's interest in mapping a star's reckoning with his persona onto a sensational but shallow script. And while he stops talking only long enough to insert his tongue down some new conquest's throat, Douglas can't quite fill in the blanks.