‘Ithaca’ review: Meg Ryan stumbles with first attempt at directing

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Meg Ryan is already a Hollywood icon thanks to her years as the face of romantic comedies, but she decided to turn to another area of film production: directing. Her first project is Ithaca, a new film version of William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy and written by Emmy winner Erik Jendresen (Band of Brothers). The result is a rushed product, with weak performances and a script that feels completely unfocused.

Ithaca is supposed to be a coming-of-age story about 14-year-old Homer Macauley (Alex Neustaedter) during World War II. He lives in the small town of Ithaca, California and works as a telegraph message delivery boy. As he delivers messages to mothers with news that their sons have died, he learns a bit about life. Or, he’s supposed to. It’s a bit hard to tell behind Neustaedter's pouting.

Meanwhile, his mom (Ryan) is dealing with the death of her husband (co-producer Tom Hanks) and trying to raise Homer’s sister Bess (Christine Nelson) and his 4-year-old brother Ulysses (Spencer Howell). Homer’s older brother Marcus (Ryan’s son Jack Quaid) is serving in the war and provides Homer with parental guidance and inspirational quotes from afar through his letters.

There’s also Hamish Linklater as Homer’s boss and Sam Shepard as Corbett, the old drunk who types up the telegraphs and who Homer looks up to.

With all these characters and only 95 minutes to work with, Ryan is stuck rushing through Homer’s development that it doesn’t even feel like Homer learns how to be the man he needs to be. Neustaedter also struggles to prove that his character has learned anything through Ithaca. He looks incredibly young (even though he’s 17 in real life) and just doesn’t have the experience under his belt to pull this off.

But it’s not really the acting that fails Ryan’s directing debut. Jendresen’s script feels more engineered to give Ryan’s friends roles. It doesn’t focus on Homer’s growth. Between using Marcus’ letters as narration and the odd scenes of Mom seeing Dad’s ghosts, how can Homer be the sole focus? And then Ryan and Jendresen allow Ulysses and the adorable young Spencer Howell to completely steal the movie.

The film’s production design is also rather drab and looks like an attempt to make moving Norman Rockwell paintings. While the period details are there, the film still looks too quickly thrown together. The one war scene looks like it was shot in front of a black screen and the smoke was supposed to cover it up. Ryan said during a post-screening Q&A that the film was shot in just 23 days (the war scene was shot in two hours!) and it sure looks like it.

Ryan might have an ability to direct and you can’t fault her for trying to bring a story she was passionate about to the big screen. But Ithaca is so bland and so unfocused that it fails to give any evidence that Ryan found a new voice as a director. At least there’s an adorable 4-year-old.

Ithaca was screened at the Savannah Film Festival, presented by the Savannah College of Art and Design. It doesn’t have a theatrical distributor or release date.