(2010) At the highest and lowest moments of your life, you're alone. In to see his doctor for a physical checkup, Ben Kalmen (Michael Douglas) chooses not to return when Dr Steinberg suggests follow-up tests from looking at the EKG results. Six and a half years later Ben (swallowing baby aspirin) has lost his reputation for honesty along with his previously lucrative car dealership in New York City after getting caught in a scam and been divorced from his wife Nancy (Susan Sarandon) after a series of affairs with younger women.

When his current girlfriend Jordan Karsch (Mary-Loiuse Parker) asks him to drive her 18-year-old daughter Allyson (Imogen Poots) up to Boston for a college interview - where Ben attended college, knows the dean, and donated significant sums to the library - he does so grudgingly, while wanting to keep on good terms with Jordan because he's counting her father's influence in getting approval of a new dealership for a fresh start.

In Boston he offers free advice about meeting women (the "untouchable girl" story) to Daniel Cheston (Jesse Eisenberg), a geeky freshman student assigned to show him around the campus; after listening to Ted Loof, another student helping Allyson get acquainted with the campus, relate his account of standing up to his coach but getting cut from the team, Ben says: "There is nothing noble about failure."

He dissuades Allyson from going up to Ted's room by asking her to consider: "What are you getting out of the transaction?" Instead she spends the night with a man more than three times her age, who teaches her to always ask for what she wants first.

More than 30 years since last being in Boston, Ben (who'd said he'd never come back) pays a visit to Jimmy Merino (Danny DeVito), an old friend (who never left and has stayed married to Annie for 34 years) in a diner inherited from his father.

Johnny Cash sings Neil Diamond's song "Solitary Man" at the outset of this intimate, ironic drama, directed by Brian Koppelman (also screenwriter) and David Levien, of a man, with an emotionally damaged organ, trying to cheat death by cheating everyone else.

Back in New York, Ben learns that the dealership has instead been awarded to Rallye Motors (from which he can't even get a salesman's position); his daughter Susan refuses him further access to herself and his grandson Scotty - "Stay away from us" - after his asking to borrow more money for rent and missing Scotty's birthday party after diddling her friend Carol Solomonde (the mother of one of Scotty's friends).

Having no one else he can turn to - cynically admitting he's not into the "friendship racket" - he goes to see Jimmy ("I don't know how to be like you") and asks for a job in the diner. But Jordan calls, threatening Ben with the long reach of her former husband, if he doesn't depart immediately from proximity to Allyson.

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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