Another sample from the book

Somehow (stubbornness, a desire to distract myself from the now-everyday horrors of current events), I am continuing to edit my manuscript. I am now on a fifth edit, and, as I always answer whenever anyone asks me how it's going, I don't hate it yet. It's probably still too long, but content-wise, I think it's pretty good. It certainly illustrates the point I'm trying to make, that pop culture has long had a complicated relationship with mental illness that's getting better as time goes on, but still isn't quite there yet.

The longest chapter is devoted to movies about depression (or at least, prominently feature a depressed character), noting that many of them can be divided into categories, among them "The Suburbs are Hell," "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Artists," and "Love is the Drug." Below is another category, "The Steve Carell Club for Very Sad Men." Enjoy, won't you?

I struggled with what to name this category. Initially, it was named in honor of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who brought an innate sadness to nearly all of his acting roles, save perhaps for Ben Stiller’s party animal friend in Along Came Polly. Then I thought maybe it should be named for a still-living actor who has the potential to bring many more very sad men to life on the big screen, and settled on Joaquin Phoenix. 

But Phoenix, like Mel Gibson without the antisemitism and abuse accusations, brings a darkness to his roles, even when playing a teenage dipshit lured into a murder plot with sex in To Die For. The exceptions are Her (2013), in which he played a lonely writer who falls in love with a fictionalized version of Siri, and the criminally underseen C’mon C’mon (2021), in which he played a lonely writer tasked with caring for his young nephew while his sister tends to her mentally ill husband. In those roles, he captured the spirit of the Very Sad Man: hapless, kind of schlubby, but well-meaning, and with an innate decency that puts the audience on his side. But he’s not the ur-Very Sad Man.

No, that’s currently Steve Carell. Though Carell is better known for his comedic roles in TV’s The Office and as Brick Tamland in Anchorman, he’s amassed a collection of dramatic performances as well, starting with 2005’s Little Miss Sunshine. Nearly all of them fit within the prescribed rules of what makes someone a cinematic Very Sad Man: a quietly suffering middle-aged (or close to middle-aged) man, usually in a creative (or academic) job of some kind, divorced or widowed, looks like they haven’t had a good night’s sleep in years, and treated with perplexment by their friends and family.

Though Carell’s most well-known (and well-regarded) Very Sad Man is Frank, a heartbroken and disgraced former college professor forced to join his sister’s family on a road trip in Little Miss Sunshine (2006), the platonic ideal is Dan Burns in 2007’s Dan in Real Life. While the movie itself isn’t memorable, its odd poster is, featuring a tight close-up of Carell’s face, sideways on a stack of pancakes, suggesting that the titular Dan is so exhausted with real life that he can’t even make it to a bed before taking a nap.

It also suggests an absurdity that isn’t present in the movie itself, which often feels like a failed sitcom about a middle-aged advice columnist coping with being a single parent to three sassy daughters and a loud, meddling family. Though Dan would rather be anywhere else than on a vacation with his parents and oafish brothers, things look up when he meets Marie (Juliette Binoche), and they hit it off immediately. However, in the kind of plot contrivance they encourage you to avoid in screenwriting school, Marie turns out to be Dan’s brother’s new girlfriend.

Don’t worry, though: after another hour or so of Dan moping over Marie, bickering with his relatives, and going on an awkward date with an old classmate, Marie decides she’d rather be with him instead, and everything works out. Dan’s brother even gets a consolation prize, because he’d rather date Dan’s old classmate anyway. All the ending needs is a freeze-frame over audience applause, which diminishes the impact of Carell’s quiet, brooding melancholy. Dan is a depressed character in a movie that treats the word “depression” like stage actors treat the word “Macbeth.” 

Steve Carell played many more variations on a theme, as a Very Sad Man facing the apocalypse in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2017), a Very Sad Man whose son dies in combat in Last Flag Flying (2017), a Very Sad Man trying to break his son of a nasty heroin addiction in Beautiful Boy (2018), a Very Sad Man recovering from a traumatic brain injury in Welcome to Marwen (2018), and a Very Sad Man who loses a cushy TV news job thanks to #MeToo in Apple TV’s The Morning Show (2019). He even played one of literature’s ultimate Very Sad Men in a 2023 stage revival of Uncle Vanya. He is contemporary cinema’s greatest moper.

He’s had plenty of predecessors. The grandfather of cinematic very sad men was James Stewart as George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, so despondent over deferred dreams, overwhelming responsibilities, money issues, and being humiliated one too many times by rich old bastard Mr. Potter that he considers suicide on Christmas Eve. Angel Clarence (who, let’s face it, has an agenda) manipulates George into feeling better about his situation by showing that even if he wasn’t happy with his life, his existence made other people’s lives better. If George had never been born, his brother would have died in an accident, Bedford Falls would have turned into a sleazy gambling town, and, worst of all, his wife Mary would have become a spinster librarian.  

The James Stewart-esque Tom Hanks starred in the mostly misunderstood Joe Versus the Volcano (1990), the first and least popular of romcoms starring Hanks and Meg Ryan. He plays Joe Banks, a depressed office drone misled into believing he’s dying of a “brain cloud,” as part of a complicated scheme involving a millionaire industrialist and a mysterious Pacific Island tribe. Once Joe makes it to the island, things get almost oppressively wacky, ending with him narrowly escaping death via volcano, falling in love with one of three versions of Meg Ryan, and, like George Bailey, being overwhelmed with gratitude for his little life, even if it wasn’t the life he wanted.

Joe Versus the Volcano is far more interesting when we get a taste of Joe’s bleak existence before the island. It captures the drudgery of office life to both hilarious and chilling effect, as Joe trudges into his dingy little workspace, where flickering fluorescent lights turn his skin a sickly grayish-green, and lumps of non-dairy creamer float in his coffee. Against the constant cacophony of typing, Joe’s boss (Dan Hedaya) loudly debates on an endless phone call about whether someone can both get a job and do that job. It’s as if Joe works at Allied Purgatory, Inc., and it’s far more relatable than death by volcanic sacrifice.

Relatability is the core of the Very Sad Man movie, which is why likable, familiar actors usually play them. Their problems are rooted in everyday life: loneliness, unrequited love, failed dreams, etc. Those problems are usually solved by the end of the movie, and, like restarting a computer with an error message, their depression disappears. It’s circumstantial at best.

In Sideways (2004), failed writer Miles Raynor (Paul Giamatti) goes on a trip to California’s Wine Country with his college buddy Jack (Thomas Haden Church). Though he’s able to show off his (often insufferable) knowledge of wines, the trip is mostly a disappointment. Jack, on the eve of his wedding, is more focused on getting laid, and, rather than have a mature conversation about it, Miles just stews and addresses everything with arrogance and sarcasm. The whole thing is a letdown, like everything else about Miles’ life, including his divorce, his unfulfilling teaching career, and his unpublishable book.

“The world doesn’t give a shit about what I have to say,” he laments to Jack. “I’m unnecessary. I’m so insignificant I can’t even kill myself.” Jack, who probably hasn’t doubted himself a day in his life, is perplexed at Miles’ sadness, and can only offer a few empty platitudes. A light comes on in the darkness when Miles meets Maya (Virginia Madsen), an almost-too-perfect woman who’s equally knowledgeable about wine, with half the pretentiousness. She’s even interested in his (frankly terrible-sounding) book, when not even Jack, his oldest (and possibly only) friend, can be bothered to read it. Though their blossoming romance is interrupted when Jack has a fling with Maya’s friend, in the end Maya expresses a willingness to pick up where she and Miles left off. Given how much of Miles’ life is devoted to wine, however, he might need several A.A. meetings before he’s ready to be a good partner.

One of the most popular TV characters of the 2020s was soccer coach/Very Sad Man Ted Lasso, in the Apple TV series of the same name. Ted (Jason Sudeikis) is given an exciting opportunity to move overseas to coach an English team, but, separated from his wife and son and not exactly greeted with open arms by his new team, he finds himself isolated and depressed. It’s a stark contrast to his happy-go-lucky, optimistic persona, and becomes harder to hide as time goes on, particularly as the separation takes a toll on Ted’s marriage.

What started as a light comedy took some devastating turns when it’s revealed that Ted’s father committed suicide, suggesting that Ted’s depression isn’t just circumstantial. Ted Lasso was unique in depicting a depressed character who doesn’t engage in self-destructive (or at least self-defeating) behavior. Quite the opposite: part of Ted’s masking involves going out of his way to help other people, and always offering a kind or encouraging word. He’s a covert Very Sad Man. It also accurately depicted recovering from depression as a process, and though by the third season Ted was improving (thanks to therapy), recovery might not be forever.

Two of the best Very Sad Men performances are by actors who, like Steve Carell, were far better known for comedy than drama. Following a successful turn as a romantic leading man in The Wedding Singer, Adam Sandler went even further outside his wheelhouse with Paul Thomas Anderson’s delightfully weird Punch-Drunk Love (2002). Sandler plays Barry Egan, lonely, anxious, depressed, and belittled by his seven sisters. After a supposedly chance encounter with Lena (Emily Watson), a woman who works with one of his sisters, Barry is besotted and takes advantage of a loophole in a contest to accumulate enough frequent flyer miles to join her on a business trip to Hawaii.

The second half of Punch-Drunk Love is a quirky love story. As far as eccentricities go, Barry and Lena have met each other’s matches: during their first intimate encounter, they talk about being so overwhelmed with attraction that they want to chew on each other’s faces. Lena is utterly unsurprised at anything Barry tells her, whether it’s that he bought hundreds of dollars’ worth of pudding for frequent flyer miles, or that he’s on the run from a group of thugs after being extorted by a phone sex operator. It might be the first time anyone’s responded to him in a way that doesn’t make him feel small or stupid. 

The first half immerses the audience in the little miseries of Barry’s life, before he takes a chance on surprising Lena in Hawaii. Though he runs his own business (selling novelty toilet plungers), his life is otherwise empty. He’s forced to spend time with his sisters, who relentlessly pick on him, then react in shock and anger when he pushes back. On his first date with Lena, Barry is so nervous that he destroys a restaurant bathroom. Not even a call to a phone sex line brings relief, as Barry reacts to the operator’s scripted “What are you wearing, big boy?” dialogue with stiff, awkward embarrassment. 

A scene where he clumsily reaches out to his brother-in-law (Robert Smigel) for help is painfully funny. “I wanted to ask you something because you’re a doctor,” Barry says. “I don’t like myself sometimes. Can you help me?” The non-plussed brother-in-law replies that he’s a dentist, but Barry, an emotional tap turned on somewhere, admits that he cries a lot “for no reason,” and bursts into tears right then and there. He needs compassion, and he gets it from Lena. Though Barry’s immediate problems are solved by the end of the movie, there’s no suggestion that his depression and anxiety have disappeared. He’s just finally being heard and understood by someone who loves him for who he is.

After over a decade of success as, according to The Onion, a “rubber-faced fartsmith,” Jim Carrey surprised audiences and critics alike with his dramatic turn in 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He plays morose, withdrawn Joel Barish, who, following a nasty breakup, undergoes a procedure to erase his ex-girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) from his memories. During the process, he relives the relationship backwards, and at first blush, it’s obvious that introverted Joel, who views expressing emotions as akin to dental surgery, is all wrong for the volatile, aggressively extroverted Clementine, and she for him.

As he gets closer to the beginning of the relationship, however, Joel sees that, despite their differences, life with Clementine was often joyous and beautiful. “I could die right now, Clem,” he tells her, in one captured moment. “I’m just happy. I’ve never felt that before. I’m just exactly where I want to be.” One would expect Carrey to play the boisterous, unpredictable half of a couple, but instead, he has the guarded mannerisms of someone who’s gotten kicked around by life. Whereas Clementine is a ball of talkative energy with day-glo colored hair, Joel is washed out in shades of gray and brown, glumly passing time by riding the train and writing in a journal. Though on paper they’re incompatible, they both have something the other needs: Clementine’s zest for living, and Joel’s gentle stability.

Though the memory-erasing procedure is a success for both of them, they manage to find each other again. Given the unique opportunity to review the recordings of their respective memories of the relationship, right down to its bitter, heartbreaking end, they tentatively decide to try again, aware of the pitfalls their emotional issues can cause (and likely will again). They’re still the same people, with the same problems, but love each other enough to at least attempt to work through them. Love may not save them (it didn’t the first time, after all), but it’s a small light in the darkness.