Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Human Capital’ on HBO Max, a Drama About Some People Who Live and Struggle in America in Medium-Interesting Ways

Now on HBO Max, Human Capital needs a little help to generate interest in watching it. Maybe it deserves it, or maybe not — we’ll get to that in a minute — but I’m here in the information business, so here goes: It’s a drama of the non-comedy variety based on a novel by medium-notable author Stephen Amidon, here adapted by Oren Moverman, Oscar-nominated screenwriter for medium-notable Iraq War film The Messenger. The film features a slightly above-medium-notable cast, including vets Liev Schreiber, Peter Sarsgaard and Marisa Tomei, and medium-hot young actress of Hollywood royalty, Maya Hawke. I don’t intend to damn with faint praise; these are all talented people. But does anyone feel a strong compulsion to watch the film? And having seen it, which way should I push you?

HUMAN CAPITAL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The scene: a fancy restaurant, the type with $300 bottles of wine and waitstaff in bowties. One of the staff is a Spanish-speaking man who asks a coworker to cover a shift for him so he can attend a family event, then bicycles down a dark country road — possibly because he’s so underpaid as a restaurant worker that he can’t afford a car; we can only assume this is true in a movie about the American Socio-Economic Class Struggle — where he’s tagged by a Jeep. He lies crumpled in the ditch. The driver stops, pauses, we hear the muffled stereo thumping inside the vehicle, then the accelerator is gunned and the truck takes off. We’ll revisit this night, because this is one of those movies that interlaces narratives and loops back to key moments to show them from different angles/perspectives and reveal important pieces of the plot, because that’s capital-P Profound compared to normal, boring, straightforward, linear storytelling.

Cut to Drew Hagel (Schreiber), driving his teen daughter Shannon (Hawke) to her boyfriend’s house in a very average Subaru. The house is neo-palatial, with lots of sharp angles, and even though we don’t see a Really Long Fireplace, there has to be one in there somewhere. The boyfriend is Jamie (Fred Hechinger), and of course his father is named Quint (Sarsgaard), and of course Quint is a sneering Hedge Fund Guy, so we automatically want to see him impaled on a pike. The mother is Carrie (Tomei), a sad-eyed woman, and when median-income guy Drew pokes around the estate instead of driving home like a normal person, he spots her barely holding herself together before she exits the house, briefly greets Drew and allows her driver to open the door to the Ranger Rover so she may be whisked away.

This is not the end of Drew’s snooping adventure. He wanders to the tennis court and meets Quint, who urges him to join. Funny, Drew played in college and is pretty good despite the schlubby way he carries himself, and that satisfies Quint, although he still seems one sniff away from dismissing this commoner out of his view. Drew — a humble real estate broker, recovering gambler and wife to a slightly younger woman, Ronnie (Betty Gabriel), who’s not Shannon’s mother, but wants to be a mother, which has been a struggle — soon fudges some paperwork and gets a loan so he can invest $300k in Quint’s fund. The real estate biz isn’t so great at the moment, and did I mention Drew used to gamble? Well, the stock market is just gambling for people who own Range Rovers and tennis courts. Should I also note that both he and Quint are brokers, except one is broke and on track to be straight-up broken?

The story loops around and back to Carrie, who’s carrying a lot of emotional weight. Her mother has dementia and Quint, well, as the stereotype of arrogant hedge-fund a-holes go, he ain’t much of a husband. She wants to buy and restore the long-empty, crumbling historic theatre in town, a passion project for the idle rich, although her motives are genuine. But will that fit in with all of Quint’s hedging and funding? We’re also privy to Shannon’s thread, which reveals the nature of her relationship with Jamie, who, surprise surprise, feels a lot of pressure from his old man to succeed and possibly become a rich shithead too. Her story soon draws in Ian (Alex Wolff), a troubled but sensitive young man, and explains why she was so elusive when Drew asked her where the hell she was all night. It all comes back to that night at the restaurant, and the poor man on the bicycle, whose life hangs by a thread.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I thought about Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm, and felt warm; then I thought about Paul Haggis’ Crash, and the warmth went away.

Performance Worth Watching: There was a time when Marisa Tomei was a punchline, but in the last decade-plus, she’s had a habit of giving strong performances no matter the quality of the production: The Wrestler, The Lincoln Lawyer, The King of Staten Island; am I the only one who yearns for an MCU Aunt May/Tomei solo vehicle? (Series or movie, doesn’t matter.) She’s no different in Human Capital, although the movie is the least of all these.

Memorable Dialogue: This exchange — decontextualized to avoid spoilers — kind of sums up Human Capital:

“I love you.”

“I don’t love you.”

“Say it again.”

Sex and Skin: Brief female toplessness; some moments of heavy breathing and/or petting.

Our Take: Human Capital — that title: ugh — stirs all the elements of the 21st-century American tragedy into a pot and melts them into a lumpy, mildly flavored mush. We’ve got The Economy, the 1% vs. the rest of us, infidelity, an LGBTQ issue thrown in like another type of nut in the bowl of homemade Chex Mix, some muted racism, mental illness, parenting struggles, the mighty scourge of indifference and, of course, life and death. What, no room for a screed on the ills of smartphones and social media? Not all of this is uniquely American, but in this particular narrative soup, the intention is clear. The film’s makers might insist the work is character-driven, and it has the illusion of such, but it is not — there are the haves, the have-nots and the have-even-lesses, the latter of which is a bicycling waiter dying somewhere in a hospital like a literary symbol heavily engineered to criticize the living crap out of society.

The cast does what it can, but the writing fails them. Schreiber and Sarsgaard try to wedge their charisma into Drew and Quint, but there’s not much room in their robotic characters. Tomei digs in to find some soul in Carrie, showing a touch of hardened and cynical bemusement, and it works for a moment or two, but she’s little more than a cypher propped up to remind us that the rich can suffer too. Hawke at least has some room to maneuver, but only because her character is a barely written wisp of a plot device. Hechinger is given a note-and-a-half to play; Wolff and Gabriel get even less. The more the film maneuvers to resolve its maudlin, melodramatic and thoroughly manufactured plot, the more it truly loses it. The best conclusion one can come to at the end is, well, I guess things have a way of sorting themselves out? Or not?

Our Call: SKIP IT. Human Capital is trying to say something profound. It’s also trying to satisfactorily resolve its plot. These things often seem incongruous — remember: real life is messy, true closure is a myth — but rarely more so than in this movie.

Human Capital debuts on HBO on July 8, 2021, at 8PM ET.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.