Solitary man

Actors who play nasty characters need to be self-confident and talented. They must make their audience both dislike, and empathise with, them, as Michael Douglas always does, like his father did. Could he do it again in the acidly comic Solitary Man?

His title character, Ben Kaplen, is a chronically egocentric and amoral auto dealer and womaniser increasingly needing to be made aware of his mortality, age, lies, delusions and unpleasantness. Can he redeem himself and could we care?

Douglas performs well in a sequence of incidents, but the screenplay's anti-hero is almost too bad to be true. Few of his supporting characters are credible either, and their strained dialogue is wasted on Susan Sarandon (separated, bitchy yet still loving wife), Mary-Louise Parker (bitchy divorcee girlfriend), Imogen Potts (tell-tale girlfriend's sleep-around tell-tale daughter), Jesse Eisenberg (young college protege who's too nice to be true), and Danny DeVito (long-ignored college pal and deli-owner who's too kind to be true).

The basic premise stretches the audience's tolerance too. We have to believe that a super-sharp business magnate, previously rich enough to endow his old uni with a library and more, fears a heart test may foretell imminent death and therefore goes fornicating, defrauding and cheating to his sick heart's content. In addition, an audience must believe that 60-something Douglas could still charm almost all the birds he wants off the trees and into his bed, and treat them rotten after.

One contrived incident follows another as we track an ageing rake's self-propelled downhill progress to working behind a deli counter. I didn't care, and hung on mainly in the hope of seeing Douglas perform a death scene.

The movie's co-writer/directors, Brian Koppelman and David Levien, have been a busy creative partnership since Rounders (1998). They worked with Steven Soderbergh on Oceans 13 and The Girlfriend Experience and need a big winner wearing their own colours. This super-typical Douglas vehicle wasn't the ticket, grossing only US$4 million at the box office.

Maybe American audiences are tired of menopausal Hollywood males' disproportionate fixation on ageing men (mostly Jewish-American) and their unhappy families. Their man of misery has been Serious (Coen Brothers) and Single (Tom Ford) as well as Solitary in the past year, joined by Greenberg (Noah Baumbach) and far too many other middle-aged egos and sagging libidos. They warrant a separate movie genre, one that should be terminated.