It ain’t easy, raising kids. But some kids are harder to raise than others.
Take Ezra, a joke-cracking, Dostoyevsky-loving, hug-hating kid on the cusp of puberty. Oh, he’s autistic, too. His dad, Max, will be happy to tell you all about it during his comedy sets.
“He didn’t speak for years,” Max says as his audience sips their drinks. But then, “when he started speaking, he wouldn’t shut up.”
Funny? Sure, autism can be funny—just like Max’s own myriad dysfunctions can be, assuming they don’t land him in prison or the hospital. (And even then, they might supply some pretty great material.) But even as Max mines Ezra’s condition for laughs, he knows those yucks come with tears, too. And worry. And issues.
Oh, so many issues.
Take today, for instance. In school, something set Ezra off. He stormed out of his class and into the street—taking most of his classmates along with him.
Ezra’s a great kid, and a smart one, too. But that little stunt earned him three Ds: a dangerous, disrespectful disturbance. Even though Ezra has done reasonably well in a normal-school setting, his teachers say there’ve been just too many disturbances. They tell Max and his ex-wife, Jenna, that it’s not fair to the other students. It’s not fair to Ezra. He needs to go to a specialized school.
Jenna gets it. Ezra’s special needs require special care. “A school built for him, how he needs to learn,” she tells Max. “No bullies. Kids just like him.”
“I’m a kid like him!” Max says. “And kids like us? We need to be with all kinds of kids!”
But when Ezra runs into the street again—this time at home, in the dead of night—Jenna and Max lose the ability to choose. The legal system takes over and forces both medication and a special school on Ezra. And when Max tries to punch the doctor prescribing the meds—well, he lands in the system’s jaws, too. With Max deemed a bad influence on his son, the court slaps Dad with a restraining order: no contact with Ezra for three months.
Max isn’t having it. His boy doesn’t need drugs. He needs a dad who’ll stand up for him. Who’ll do what needs to be done.
So late one night, Max leaves a critical comedy set early, sneaks Ezra out of Jenna’s house and packs him into the car.
Nothing wrong with Ezra that a secret, illegal, multistate road trip can’t cure, right?
We can question Max’s decision making. But his love for Ezra? Yep, Max shows that he’d do just about anything for his son, and he’ll prove it in every continental time zone.
That’s a common theme in this movie: questionable decisions, but decisions made out of love.
Take Jenna, who loves Ezra just as much as Max—even though she has a much different idea of what’s best for her son. When she discovers that Ezra’s gone (and reads Max’s note explaining why), Jenna’s left in a pickle: Max and Ezra’s cross-country trip is not just illegal, but potentially dangerous for the boy. But should she bring the police in to help get her son and ex-husband back? Some might question her eventual decision. But when she makes it, Jenna’s motives are good.
And then there’s Max’s own dad, Stan. Max lives with this crusty codger, and they bicker and banter like a sitcom couple. But Stan’s love for his own son isn’t in question, even as he encourages him to make the right choices for Ezra.
And what would Stan consider to be the right decision? It depends on where we are in the movie, honestly. Stan encourages Max to come home, but he also comes to appreciate Max’s ferocious, almost unhinged protection of Ezra.
“You’re fighting for something,” Stan tells his son. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re my heavyweight champion. … You might have to suffer consequences, but it’s worth it because you did it for the right reasons. You did it because you love your kids.”
Others come alongside this small family, be it offering emotional support or a place to stay for the night.
During their trip, Max and Ezra stay with Nick, a comic-turned-camp manager. Nick runs the camp with help from Sister Margaret, a Catholic novitiate from Senegal. And at first, Nick almost brushes off their business relationship. “As long as she’s on my staff, the Catholic church pays half my expenses,” Nick tells Max.
But their friendship feels surprisingly sweet, and Sister Margaret proves to be one of the film’s most sincere, likable characters.
When Margaret walks away from Nick to attend to other matters, she seems to pray over him. “Did she just bless you?” Max asks.
“She does it every time she leaves,” Nick says, joking that she might be trying to convert him. “I’m Greek Orthodox, and we don’t go there,” he adds, again mostly in jest. But he adds that Margaret’s the “holy spirit.” The reference isn’t intended to be blasphemous, but rather just Nick’s belief that Sister Margaret walks the walk. She embodies Christ’s nature in a way that so few do.
A joke is made about psychokinesis. When Max and Ezra show up at another friend’s doorstep, Ezra says that “this place looks like a demon movie waiting to happen.” Max and Ezra go to a costume get-together dressed as characters from (the R-rated) The Big Lebowski. Max goes as “Jesus,” a character in the film, while Ezra goes as “The Dude.”
After one of his stand-up sets, Max takes home one of his female fans and sleeps with her. When he starts crying in the middle of the night, though, she hurriedly preps to leave—meeting Stan on the way out the door. “He cried, didn’t he?” Stan says, before offering the woman something to eat.
Jenna has moved on a bit better, and she has a steady, live-in boyfriend, Bruce. The two lightly kiss and show affection for one another.
We hear Max make a joke at the expense of another woman, suggesting that she’s a prostitute.
A female comedian—on stage right before Max—jokes about being a lesbian. “Every time my dad interacts with a gay person, he calls me,” she tells the audience. Ezra laments that he’ll likely die a virgin.
During Ezra and Max’s stay with Nick, Sister Margaret tells the two adults that she’s a little smitten with Ezra.
“There’s no future, Sister,” Nick jokes. “Don’t lead him on.”
“I haven’t taken my vows yet,” Margaret says with a smile.
[Spoiler Warning] Ezra does meet a more appropriate match: a girl perhaps just a little bit older than he is on a Nebraska farm. The girl, Ruby, is friendly and kind, and Ezra does indeed seem a bit twitterpated by her. And when Ruby gives her a goodbye hug—remember, Ezra hates hugs or physical contact of any kind—he nervously accepts it, and he tentatively puts his arms around her, too.
When an older boy chides the two to “get a room,” Ezra turns to the kid and, with an air of educated sincerity, says, “I don’t mean to be rude, but it was not as easy as it looked.”
Max clearly has anger issues. He lunges at a doctor, which sets a big chunk of the plot in motion. When a woman at a comedy club questions why Max’s son is there at such a late hour, he insults her—then takes a swing at her husband. (Ezra later tells Max that the couple actually owns the comedy club—but only after Ezra bites the woman’s arm in a gesture of solidarity with his dad.) Max gets into a scuffle with police as well, and we’re told that he once hit Conan O’Brien in the crotch.
Where does he get this sort of behavior? From his dad, of course. Stan used to be a chef in some of New York’s best restaurants, we learn, until he had a run-in with a patron who complained that his steak wasn’t rare enough: When the customer asked why there wasn’t enough blood on his plate, Stan punched him in the face and, thus, gave him the blood he was looking for.
But Stan’s anger issues took a darker turn at home, apparently.
When Max, at the end of his tether, nearly hits Ezra during the road trip, he calls Stan as a last resort. Stan tells him to do whatever he needs to do to keep from lashing out physically at Ezra.
“Bite your arm off. Tie yourself to a tree. Do whatever you need to do to not hit your kid. It’s that simple,” Stan says. And then he adds, “Look at what happened with us. It killed me. You cannot hit him. You cannot hit him!”
Ezra overhears Jenna and Bruce talking about Max—with Bruce jokingly offering to “take care of” Max permanently. He quotes a threat from Breaking Bad, and—because he and Max just binged Breaking Bad a few days before—Ezra knows the quote and takes it literally. He dashes outside, gets frightened by a dog and then runs into the street, where a car nearly hits him.
While we don’t see it often, Ezra has a violent streak in him as well, and we hear officials worry about whether he poses a danger to himself and/or others. Max jokes with Ezra that he shouts so much because “Pop-Pop” (Ezra’s pet name for Stan) kept him chained to a radiator in the attic, and he had to shout to remind Pop-Pop to feed him. (“There are no radiators in attics,” an exasperated Ezra tells him.) There’s some discussion about a shotgun. Max drives a car cross-country in an effort to avoid a police blockade—a bumpy and potentially dangerous ride.
During his comedy bit, Max says that Musical Chairs is “the original Squid Game.” Someone is threatened with a knife.
About 35 f-words and more than a dozen s-words. We also hear “a–,” “b–ch,” “h—,” “pr-ck” and “d-ck.” God’s name is misused seven times, once with the word “d–n.” Jesus’ name is abused three times.
Max smokes a marijuana joint before heading up on stage for a comedy set. “Max is stoned! Max is stoned!” Ezra yells. At Nick’s camp, the two comics use a bong.
As mentioned, the state forces Ezra to take anti-psychotic medication, drugs that Max says in a comedy set are meant for the “criminally insane.” Standing across the street, Max watches Ezra sit in a nearly comatose state in the playground at his new school, and he’s convinced the drugs are doing his son more harm than good.
Max performs most of his comedy sets in clubs where most of the patrons are drinking. Max regularly drinks whiskey at such establishments, while Ezra orders up glasses of pineapple juice.
The core of Ezra, the movie, is predicated on an illegal act: Max violating a restraining order and kidnapping of his own kid. Sure, you could argue that the restraining order wasn’t necessary, but there it was. And when an Amber alert is issued on behalf of Ezra, Max must evade police across several states—and he ropes in a friend to help him. (“Can we go inside?” he asks. “I’m kind of a fugitive from the law.”)
The friend does help—lying to the police in order to do so. We also hear about some long-buried family issues. And Max is pretty rude to Jenna’s new beau, Bruce.
While reading a sign by the family toilet that says big boys urinate in the bowl, Ezra urinates on the sign instead. Later, he and Max urinate side-by-side in the woods.
Stan believes that Nick stole one of his favorite pans several years ago.
When Max is visiting old pal, Nick, Max tells the ex-comic that the word autism comes from the Greek word auto, which means self. According to Max, autism describes someone “in his own world.”
“I don’t want him in his own world,” Max says, tearfully. “I want him in this world.”
We parents love our children. And as such, we want to share with them all of life’s joys and beauties. We want to teach them what we can. We want to care for them and protect them and prepare them. We want them to be a part of our worlds. We want to be a part of theirs.
But when children are on the spectrum, moms and dads find a wall in the way. And that wall can sometimes feel 50 feet tall.
Ezra, the movie, tells us about how Max tries to tear down that wall—knock it down with his fists, his feet, his rock-hard head. We see his heart, his will, his desire to connect with his son. To bring him into this world.
But despite making headway, he comes to understand something sad, something critical. That wall doesn’t care. Chip away at it at the edges, and it’ll still be there. Ultimately, Max—as is the case with many a parent—must somehow learn to love through that wall.
Ezra is, in many ways, a nice, sweet film. And, in its own curious way, it stands up for the rights of parents over the rights of the state—which, from our perspective, is kinda nice. Doctors and police overstep a bit here—and while that certainly doesn’t excuse Max breaking the law, it does remind us that, most often, parents really do know best.
But not always. Parents can be blinded by their own love, too.
We meet a handful of imperfect, even troubled people here who are making the best of what they’ve been given. We see them try to make good decisions under impossible conditions. Ezra tells us that, sometimes, the best of intentions do matter; and when those “best intentions” lead to bad decisions, the film makes sure that the decision-makers suffer the consequences.
But this film comes with its own walls as well. Profanity shapes the bricks, some sexual asides mix the mortar. And while these walls didn’t need to be there, they are. And adults interested in watching must decide whether to scale those walls and accept the movie on its own, imperfect terms.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
