When You Finish Saving the World Review: A Smart but Overdone Satire of Narcissism

Satire doesn’t have to be subtle to be effective, but believability helps. Jesse Eisenberg’s feature-length directorial debut, When You Finish Saving the World, is a clever, funny, but overly schematic satire about mother-and-son narcissists who are so blind to the world around them that it’s a wonder that the two hadn’t yet died from walking into traffic. That isn’t to say that people this oblivious don’t exist, but the insight or comedy to be mined from the misadventures of these two is somewhat limited when the entire story seems at times to be nothing more than a series of potshots at a couple of very large, hard-to-miss targets.

Adapted Eisenberg’s 2020 audiobook of the same name, the film identifies its main characters as a familiar stripe of comfortably upper-middle-class, public radio-listening family. Despite her job as a social worker at a women’s shelter, Evelyn (Julianne Moore) doesn’t appear to know how to interact with other humans, while her son, Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard), is a gawky goon whose life revolves around performing painfully earnest indie folk songs on his social media channel. Both realize at the same time that there’s something missing from their lives. Each takes an abrupt, intense interest in a different person in their lives who they seem to believe will help fulfill some aspect of their clumsy search for meaning and purpose.

The unfortunate target of Evelyn’s attention is Kyle (Billy Bryk), the teenaged son of a woman who’s come to the shelter to get away from an abusive husband. Smart and empathic, Kyle very clearly seems like the son that Evelyn wishes she had. She views him as a rescue mission, continually describing him as “special” in a way that makes clear her classist disdain for his desire to work in his dad’s auto body shop, not to mention her disappointment in her actual son. Her project of yanking Kyle into her world ranges from the out of touch (pushing him to apply to Oberlin College despite his clear lack of interest) to the condescending (bringing him to an Ethiopian restaurant in the self-regarding belief that she’s opening up his world).

Throughout When You Finish Saving the World, which is adaptated from his own Audible audiobook from 2020, Eisenberg presents most of Evelyn’s scenes with a sharp and knowing cultural verisimilitude that will feel familiar to fans of his New Yorker-style fiction. A canny writer and confident director, he has a knack for sharp yet understated dialogue in which his characters reveal more about themselves than they intend. And with this film he’s created a world that feels lived-in, using a naturalistic 1970s-style cinematography and understated comedic tone that has the feel of a finely crafted short story.

While Evelyn blindly indulges her savior complex, Ziggy identifies a classmate at his high school, Lila (Alisha Boe), as the one person who has the depth and authenticity that he’s been seeking. Listening to Lila and her politically engaged friends argue about the ethics of aid to developing countries, he crashes into the conversation, verbally flailing in a space that makes no sense to him but exhibits a kind of authenticity that he finds attractive.

Seeming to have only one friend and no understanding of how people relate to one another, Ziggy keeps faceplanting as he tries to impress Lila with his supposed newfound interest in “politics.” He doesn’t get that his twee songs won’t go over well at the “Revolutionary Art” open-mic series that she attends and that statements like “I’m all about being passionate” won’t communicate a hidden depth behind his puppy-dog eagerness and preening self-regard.

When You Finish Saving the World is so eager to illustrate the absurd ways that Evelyn and Ziggy’s disconnection from reality wreaks collateral damage on people around them that at times it can feel as shallow as the characters themselves. The satire hits its targets dead on, illustrating the hypocrisy of both do-gooder liberals who deep down have very little patience for the people they claim to want to help and wannabe social media stars who will adopt any idealistic pose that pushes up their likes. But Eisenberg’s relentlessly villainous rendering of these characters—particularly Evelyn, whose two-dimensionality is underlined by Moore’s permanently tensed jaw and slightly dead eyes—flattens them to the point of caricature.