When You Finish Saving the World: Jesse Eisenberg’s Directorial Debut Lands a Bullseye

By Karen Gordon

Rating: A

It was inevitable that actor Jesse Eisenberg would write and direct a feature film.

The versatile Oscar-nominated actor (The Social Network) is a Renaissance Man with a parallel career as a writer. He’s a published author (Bream Gives me Hiccups), and a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He’s also a playwright with several produced works to his credit, and he’s directed a short film.

When You Finish Saving The World, his feature directorial debut, is based on his Audible Original podcast, which won the Audie for Best original work. It’s an impressive debut. The film is a deceptively simple story about a mother and son who don’t get each other.

Eisenberg has pulled together an excellent cast, led by the formidable Julianne Moore. She plays Evelyn, a quiet, super-serious woman who runs a shelter for families escaping domestic abuse. She’s professional and sympathetic, but at the same time seems socially awkward and slightly out of tune with people.

She has a teenaged son, a high school senior named Ziggy, played by Canadian actor Finn Wolfhard, who reprises his role from the audiobook. Ziggy is intense. He’s totally focused on himself and his music. He writes songs, mostly about his feelings, and debuts them on a social media platform where, as he tells anyone and everyone, he has 20,000 followers from around the world. He has wrapped his identity around the idea of his music and carries his guitar everywhere he goes.

Ziggy’s mind is not fully occupied by his music; his plan is to turn himself into a rich star musician. He has a big crush on a schoolmate named Lila (Alisha Boe). She’s politically minded, and during breaks between classes Ziggy, sits awkwardly within earshot and listens to her and her group of friends talk about issues of injustice.

He can’t really keep up with her, but still tries to insert himself in the conversations in an attempt to win her attention. There is, however, one place he thinks their interests intersect. She regularly goes to a small performance space, where socially minded students to go perform poetry and music. Ziggy believes his songs could impress her.

Evelyn, for her part, is focused on a new resident to the shelter. Kyle (Billy Bryk) is the same age as Ziggy. When he and his mother Angie (Eleonore Hendricks) check in, Evelyn notices how tuned-in Kyle is to his mother. He’s already working a trade, thinking about making a living from it. Evelyn sees potential in him and tries to spend time with him, and guide him towards a career she thinks suits him. And that quest occupies her attention.

They’re living in the same house, but they might as well be living in parallel universes. Evelyn seems mystified by Ziggy. Ziggy is wrapped up in himself and his own frustration, which includes not being able to communicate with his mother. If their relationship was a maze, they’d both be stuck somewhere in the middle, confused by each other.

For a lot of the film, Eisenberg keeps their storylines separate. When they do cross paths, it’s not really to share any normal ‘what happened in your day’ parent-child conversations, but serves to show a kind of awkward disconnection between the two.

Even still, something hangs in the air between them. We get the feeling there’s an unspoken yearning there for both to find a point of connection.

Eisenberg has written a beautiful script that doesn’t rush or play for easy laughs. He’s has kept the movie small, and avoided grand gestures that would take When You Finish Saving the World into comedy at the expense of his characters.

In some ways it plays like two distinct character studies. The movie’s tone falls somewhere between a light family comedy and drama. The result is an enjoyable movie that rewards with more depth than you’d expect.

Of course, in a movie about relationships, a lot rests on the shoulders of the cast. Perhaps no surprise that Moore brings complexity to her character. She’s one of the least showy actors working in film, incapable of a false move, and yet can in the quietest way — with a simple gesture — give you a sense of where her character is coming from.

She gives us a woman who is both dedicated to what she’s doing, but also in many ways maybe feeling stuck and confused. Wolfhard’s Ziggy is a wonderful match. Ziggy is going through a lot of very common things that teenagers do at that age, but we never feel like Ziggy is just a cliché.

And their ability to give quietly layered performances is key to the success of the movie. Evelyn and Ziggy are both full of contradictions they don’t see about themselves. They’re very focused looking for something outside of the house, outside of the family, that they feel is deeply important to them.

As the movie goes on, they each make their moves, and have their experiences. But in the film’s quiet way, the separate storylines, the separate challenges, wind the characters back to something different and much more basic than they expect.

There’s no big dramatic finish here for us or the characters. That’s not really where Eisenberg is pointing. There’s more depth than meets the eye, and When You Finish Saving The World manages to be sweet and yet not sentimental, and with much to contemplate after the movie ends.

For Eisenberg, now officially a film writer-director, another career milestone.

When You Finish Saving the World. Written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg. Starring Julianne Moore, Finn Wolfhard, Alisha Boe, Jay O. Sanders, Billy Bryk, and Eleonore Hendricks. In theatres January 27.