In a self-indulgent tribute to the world in which he grew up and to which his current career is obviously indebted, Azazel Jacobs’ third feature treads a fine line between alienating and welcoming the audience to his lead characters’ thirty-something life crisis. Set in the New York loft apartment which Azazel himself grew up in, Momma’s Man tells the tale of Mikey, whose short visit to his parents’ home is constantly extended for no apparent reason much to the concern of his parents and the anxious confusion of his wife, in California with their baby girl.
Beautifully unhurried in every way, we watch as Mikey indolently decides not to catch his flight home, instead returning to his parents’ cluttered apartment with an excuse about airline troubles. This same excuse translated into different varieties keeps Mikey in New York for an unspecified number of days during which he rummages through boxes of memories from his younger years, eventually stops taking his wife’s calls, visits a now ex-con old friend trying to stay off drugs and even tracks down an old girlfriend. With no narrative rhyme or reason, we follow Mikey’s lethargic days and nonsensical behaviour; a man filling his time with getting drunk on his parents’ cheap booze, playing video games and killing time with ludicrous shaving and singing enterprises.
Jacobs himself admits that he originally wanted merely to document this space he grew up in and one can clearly understand why. The home of his parents, experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs and painter Flo (geniously cast as the mother and father in this film), truly is a sight to behold. With piles of books, filmmaking and projection equipment, toys, knick-knacks, boxes, and almost anything else you can think of cluttering this space, it truly is a treasure trove of information, art, and memories standing testament to the two bohemian parents and their son who was raised there. No photograph could have shown what Jacobs has captured within this film and it’s possible that it would have been interesting enough to document nothing more than this collection of ‘things’ all telling a tale about the inhabitants and their lives. However, as this is plainly a personal project, Jacobs’ narrative details how he himself reflects on it all.
A ‘chip off the old block,’ Jacobs has adopted his parents’ imagination and more specifically, his father’s line of work. Momma’s Man can be seen as a project of coming to terms with the fact that despite an artist’s ambition to be nothing but original, Azazel Jacobs, like everyone else, is a product of his parents and their physical and metaphysical influences. Each of his inspirations, memories, and characteristics can be tracked back to one of the hundreds of books, paintings, wall hangings, gadgets, and most especially the people in this one apartment. And just as Mikey does, Jacobs revisits the location of his creative and literal origins to rediscover, play with, and pay tribute to it.
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