Mikey (Matt Borem) the thirty-something layabout at the center of this self-consciously indie effort by Azazel Jacobs, in some ways caught the zeitgeist of its day, as you could almost envision Will Ferrell or Adam Sandler in this helpless but cute man-child role that celebrates apathy, prevarication, procrastination, shiftlessness, and abdication of responsibility—so much so that you’d think it had been made in 1994.
Much like the original slacker—the 19th-century “superfluous man” of Russian literature, Oblomov—Mikey’s is a mighty comfortable bourgie brand of pre-mid-life crisis loserdom, one in which he spends a lot of time in bed—his parents’ bed. Unlike the aforementioned Russian antihero, however, Mikey has actually had some life experience, as he has a wife and kid in Los Angeles.
But on a trip back home to New York to visit his upper-middle-class NYC artist parents, he decides on a whim one day to move back to the old homestead (or cramped Manhattan artist loft in this case). We’re never given much of a clue why Mikey’s breakdown happens—what’s going on at home?
But the womb-like warmth of hearth and home triggers something so psychologically crippling that soon we wonder if he will become part of the furniture at his parents’ house—the bed mostly—and completely abandon his wife and child forever for a chance at something like a second childhood. (Or perhaps it's just a way to drift in a space of temporary purgatory in a safe domestic space where hard adult choices never have to be made.)
Whatever the case, director Jacobs is right to cast an air of ambiguity around his central character’s motives for the lifestyle transformation he undergoes in the film. In fact, there may be no conscious motive: which could possibly be the most disturbing element of all in Momma’s Man.
It’s difficult to even call Mikey an anti-hero since to be “anti” involves some kind of energy (however negative) directed at something or someone. Trouble is, Mikey’s mental and physical stagnation can only serve to neuter the film as a whole, provoking neither a thumbs up nor down but just wholehearted indifference. Optional.