In A.C.O.D. Adam Scott plays Carter, an “adult child of divorce,” whose traumatic childhood family situation has given way to an adulthood defined my normalcy and order. He is a successful restaurateur, has a seemingly healthy relationship with his girlfriend, and is a pal to his younger brother Trey (Clark Duke). But when Trey decides to get hitched on a whim, it sends a tremor though Carter’s life. First off, Carter has no stomach for marriage after witnessing his parent’s catastrophic breakup, and so he can’t figure out why Trey would want to marry his girlfriend of just four months Kieko (Valerie Tian). And a wedding would mean mounting the impossible: an event that can contain both father Hugh (Richard Jenkins) and mother Melissa (Catherine O’Hara) in the same room.
Weddings are useful platforms in comedies for the dredging of buried familial anxieties, though in A.C.O.D., the comedy’s take on dysfunction, commitment, love, and reconciliation don’t drag into play much more than the same old, same old. The situation does spark a handful of laughs. Richard Jenkins is particularly memorable as the philandering father, and he leans into his character’s edgy-solipsism with such tenacity you wish he had more character to leverage. O’Hara is slightly less captivating as the flibberty and frantic mom. And Amy Poehler feels wasted as Sondra, Hugh’s ditsy third (or is it fourth?) wife.
More interesting is watching Adam Scott in a lead comedic role after so many solid parts as a secondary character in films like Step Brothers and Knocked Up. He’s a consummate straight man, whose role is to hold the looney loose ends in orbit around a grounded character. But Carter’s character has trouble in the final act, when the film’s hijinks are supposed to easy into an array of off-the-shelf movie comedy emotional resolutions. There’s little to bite into, and less to laugh at.
