What’s a heavyweight cast like that—Bobby Cannavale, Rose Byrne, Robert De Niro , Whoopi Goldberg , Vera Farmiga, Rainn Wilson from The Office —doing in a melodramatic misfire like this? Ezra has its heart in the right place, but that’s the best that can be said about Tony Goldwyn’s strained family drama, which lacks trust in the intrinsic power of its depiction of parents raising a 11-year-old who is neurodiverse, stacking the audience’s sympathies with a manipulative story of parental abduction, cross-country road trips, and Jimmy Kimmel Live , squandering goodwill as it goes. Cannavale stars as New York comedy writer Max, who’s pursuing a career in stand-up but can scarcely get through his sets at the Comedy Cellar without self-sabotaging. That the jokes we hear him deliver are the types of groaners you’d never expect to leave the safety of a writer’s notepad (“I met my inner child, and he had a gun”) is par for the course with a character who’s at the mercy of his own compulsions, either oblivious to his impact on others or unable to get out of his own way.
Max struggles to connect with Ezra (newcomer William A. Fitzgerald), the son he shares with estranged ex-wife Jenna (Byrne), even as he rejects out of hand the suggestion that anyone else knows the best way to reach his kid, who’s been acting out at school. When, at a parent-teacher conference, Ezra’s teachers discuss their recommendation that he be medicated and sent to a special-needs scho.
