Tadpole: The Longing of Midlife

I don't know much about privileged adults in Manhattan who send their children to private school. Nor do I know much about privileged middle aged women who want to have sex with the son of a privileged father and his second wife who have sent their fifteen year old to private school.

So, I decided, as the movie "Tadpole" got under way that I would do what I always do when I watch a movie: Surrender. Believe.

Tadpole is the nickname of the fifteen year old private high school student from Manhattan. His real name is Oscar. Oscar Grubman.

He's precocious. He regards himself as too sophisticated for the other students his age, especially the girls.

"Tadpole" is a Thanksgiving movie and immediately made me think of "Pieces of April", not because the stories have a lot in common, but because they are both Thanksgiving movies, focused on a family through the experience of an adolescent.

As often happens in such movies, while the focus may be on the adolescent, the movie turns out to be a lot about the adults.

That's certainly true in "Tadpole".

It's a movie about the pain and longing of middle age. The marriage of Oscar's father (John Ritter) and step-mother (Sigourney Weaver) staggers along with academic life, academically inflected conversations, and weariness. They long, without saying so, for more, but don't do much about their longings.

The step-mother's best friend, Diane (Bebe Neuwirth) expresses her longing for excitement beyond her work as a chiropractor through sex. In fact, she seduces Oscar (the tadpole, who is not even a frog yet). Post conquest, she shows him off to her middle-aged friends, privileged, also burnt out, and they want their sexual shot at Oscar, too.

It's all complicated by Oscar's feelings: he has a crush on his step-mother. He longs to usurp his father, take over as the lover of his father's wife. And, in her academic loneliness and life of academic routine, Eve Grubman is susceptible. She longs for something more.

"Tadpole" is a comedy, especially in structure. Clarification occurs. Its unusual world of longings and trysts is, as comedy promises, set right.

Watching it, I didn't think much about Oscar. My concern was with the middle-aged adults. In the imaginary future beyond this Thanksgiving weekend, I imagined Oscar maturing beyond his tadpole stage and becoming a successful, worldly young man.

I don't know what will happen to him in middle age.

By the looks of his parents and their friends, my guess is he's headed toward a middle age of aching and longing.

It's sobering.