Full Grown Men

Spending 80 minutes with Alby Cutrera (Matt McGrath), the insufferable protagonist of “Full Grown Men,” a serious road comedy about arrested development, is excruciating enough. But it is hard to imagine why any sane woman would actually marry and have a child with this unemployed 35-year-old cartoonist, who has the emotional maturity of a 10-year-old.
When first encountered, Alby has a wife, Suzanne (Katie Kreisler), and a little boy, Josh, with whom he likes to play on the floor as if they were the same age. Eventually Suzanne loses patience and throws her husband out of the house, telling him not to come back until he grows up. Alby retreats to the home of his strangely catatonic mother; while there he decides to make a road trip to his childhood mecca, Diggityland, a Florida theme park that suggests Disney World with another name.
Alby’s rationalization for the trip is his plan to sell his collectible action toys en route. With the thousands he expects to make from the sale, he will show Suzanne that he is a responsible breadwinner.
This candy-colored movie, whose soft hues match the colored cereal loops that Alby devours at his mother’s house, is a post-Freudian fable that wants to be a kind of anti-“Wizard of Oz” for a culture inundated with toys and toons. Directed by David Munro, who wrote the screenplay with Xandra Castleton, it takes a harder look at the infantilized American male than might appear on the surface. But how true is its guiding assumption that childhood is paradise?
Alby travels with his boyhood best friend, Elias Guber (Judah Friedlander), a dour, chubby special education teacher who is headed for Diggityland to accept an award for his work. Along the way they meet bizarre, sometimes sinister variations of Dorothy’s traveling companions on the road to Oz. But only one, a gun-toting, disgruntled former employee of Diggityland (Alan Cumming), whom they briefly pick up, actually enters the car.
Alby’s flight into childhood becomes a paradoxically surreal journey into reality; the more juvenile his behavior, the more savagely the grown-up world slaps him down. As Alby and Elias compare shared boyhood pranks, what was blissful for Alby turns out to have been torture for Elias, whom Alby relentlessly bullied and made the butt of cruel practical jokes.
Thematically, the movie parallels Miguel Arteta’s 2000 film, “Chuck & Buck,” whose screenwriter, Mike White, played another young man afflicted with arrested development who drives across the country in the crazy expectation of resuming the homoerotic relationship he enjoyed with his best friend, now married, when they were boys.
Besides the hitchhiker, the scariest person Alby encounters on the trip is Trina (Amy Sedaris), a bartender and aspiring circus clown, who enlists a group of midgets to beat him up when he can’t pay his bar bill. Deborah Harry has a cameo as a former professional mermaid living a solitary existence in an Airstream trailer and is a sad image of what Alby might become if he doesn’t snap out of his fantasy.
The most hopeful sign that Alby can save himself is his touching relationship with Rollie (Benjamin Karpf), a student of Elias, with whom Alby intuitively empathizes. But there are not enough such redemptive moments to make Mr. McGrath’s Alby any less grating a screen presence than one of Jim Carrey’s maniacs. And Alby isn’t even funny.
Da The New York Times, 25 giugno 2008