Rating: 
Posted: 12:42 am
August 22, 2008
IT'S time to stop calling Azazel Jacobs a "promising" filmmaker. With "Momma's Man," Jacobs achieves the promise.
The deeply affecting "Momma's Man" goes far inside John Cassavetes territory. Mikey (Matt Boren) visits his doting parents during a business trip to New York, leaving his wife and child back in California.
Comes time to go home, he encounters two problems. His airline, All American Sky, bumps him (nothing surprising there). Worse, some strange mental paralysis keeps him from leaving his parents' home, a cluttered Chambers Street loft. (Luis Bunuel's surreal "The Exterminating Angel" comes to mind.)
The abode just happens to be the real-life home of 35-year-old Jacobs' parents, experimental filmmaker Ken and painter Flo. In a sweet touch, they also portray Mikey's parents.
Stuck in the loft, Mikey - a pudgy, balding 30-something - reads comic books, badgers the airline on his cellphone, contacts a high school sweetheart who is now a wife and mother, and watches Chaplin's "Monsieur Verdoux" on TV in bed with his parents.
In the sweetest scene, Mikey, unable to walk down the steps outside his parents' loft, descends a flight on his butt, then congratulates himself with two thumbs up.
"Momma's Man" is Jacobs' third feature, following "Nobody Needs To Know" and "The GoodTimesKid," which I included on my 2007 Top 10 list.
"Momma's Man" is his most mature, confident work yet.
Boren, an occasional character on TV's "How I Met Your Mother," seems at home in the role of Mikey, as if he were portraying himself from memory.
And Ken and Flo (her sleepy voice is infectious) are so laid-back that they seem to be sleepwalking through their parts. (That's a compliment.)
MOMMA'S MAN
Mother knows best.
Running time: 95 minutes. Not rated (profanity) At the Angelika, Mercer and Houston streets.
vam@nypost.com
