Ezra: Great Cast Keeps Family Drama Out of the Maudlin Zone

By Liz Braun

Rating: B+

Bobby Cannavale is the main reason to see Ezra, a family drama about fathers and sons. Cannavale stars as Max and Rose Bryne as Jenna, parents of an adolescent on the spectrum.

Ezra is their neurodivergent son, a bright kid of 11 with occasional behaviour and impulse control issues. Max and Jenna, who are separated, do not agree about how Ezra should be raised and educated, and the story grows in part out of their differences.

Robert De Niro plays Max’s difficult father; the cast includes Rainn Wilson, Whoopi Goldberg, Vera Farmiga and Tony Goldwyn, who also directs.

Despite the specificity of ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), Ezra is a film about parenting, family, and doing whatever it takes to protect one’s children. It’s written by filmmaker Tony Spiridakis, himself the parent of a now-adult child with ASD. Casting for the film was done with care, and newcomer William A. Fitzgerald, who plays Ezra, is on the spectrum himself.

Ezra begins with Max, who is a stand-up comic, on stage. His routine includes stories about Ezra and some of the frustrations involved in raising a child with ASD, and the snippet of his routine we get to see is darkly funny.

Things are less comical in real life, where Ezra is about to be expelled from another school for impulsive and potentially dangerous behaviour. Jenna plays nice with the school authorities, hoping they’ll give Max one more chance; Max takes the bull-in-a-china-shop approach, furiously (and correctly) pointing out that Ezra is treated unfairly compared to other kids.

In the end, Max is expelled. Things get worse when another incident prompts a psych evaluation for Ezra, and doctors recommend drug therapy and placement in a special school.

This breaks Max’s heart. The new meds and the new school seem to further marginalize Ezra. Hoping to protect his son, Max decides to take Ezra and flee the situation — speaking of poor impulse control — taking his dad’s car and driving from New Jersey to a friend’s (Rainn Wilson) place in Michigan.

Somewhere in here, Max learns he’s booked for a spot on Jimmy Kimmel, a huge coup for a comic that partly justifies his drive west toward L.A.

The film then turns into a bit of a road movie about parenting and father-son relationships, with Max and Ezra having various adventures and misadventures; Jenna and Max’s father attempt to find them before the authorities do.

The plot gets a little bananas — at one point Max and Ezra hitchhike to see another friend — but by then you so love the characters that you’ll sit still for all of it.

Ezra is often very funny, and sometimes it’s despair-inducing. The bond between Max and Ezra captures all the intense highs and lows of parenting in general.

What the film does well is investigate the relationships involved in the messy world of adult life. The way Max interacts with his manager (Whoopi Goldberg) and his friends, his emotional shorthand with Jenna when it comes to their son, the ongoing beef between Max and his father. Cannavale and De Niro are spectacular together here, particularly in scenes that emphasize how parenting never really ends.

For this viewer, always on high alert for emotional manipulation, Ezra is an engaging movie that works because of sharp writing and terrific performances.

Why, however, it’s called Ezra and not Max is a mystery, because it’s about the man, not the boy. Either it was written that way or, more likely, Cannavale just stole the show. Guess we’ll never know.

Ezra. Directed by Tony Goldwyn. Written by Tony Spiridakis. Starring Bobby Cannavale, William A. Fitzgerald, Rose Byrne, Rainn Wilson, Whoopi Goldberg, Vera Farmiga and Tony Goldwyn. In theatres May 31.