'Men, Women & Children' grim and heavy-handed

If “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby” hadn’t already co-opted the song and the allusion, you could call “Men, Women & Children” an Eleanor Rigby movie. That is, to quote Lennon and McCartney, “All the lonely people/Where do they all come from?”

Set in Austin, Texas, and adapted from a first novel by Chad Kultgen, “Men, Women & Children” offers a doggedly glum and entirely unoriginal survey of miserable people - teenagers in high school, texting, sexting, and cyberbullying, and their respective parental units, sneaking off to watch Internet porn, or to hotels for assignations with strangers they’ve “met” in chat rooms.

Everybody is lying, to one another, to themselves. Everybody is sad.

And the tools that were supposed to make us closer, to make communication more immediate, more intimate, have driven us further into our isolated worlds.

The only thing at all surprising about “Men, Women & Children” is the name on the director credit: Jason Reitman, who in “Juno” and “Up in the Air,” demonstrated a gift for bringing piercing humor to the darkest of situations.

Somehow, though, the gravity of the subject here has sunk him - like a suicide with rocks in his pockets, jumping off a bridge.

It’s a wonder the actors aren’t showing bruise marks from all the heavy-handed direction, the unrelenting solemnity of the thing.

Others, however, stand no chance with the screenplay’s transparent melodrama. Jennifer Garner is one-note and fussy as the aforementioned mother, hacking into her daughter’s e-mail and Tumblr accounts.

Adam Sandler, bearded and hangdoggy, oozes self-pity as the mopey spouse with a porn addiction - and with a wife (Rosemarie DeWitt) who has started cheating on him.

Emptiness and despair ricochet around their home; if they were cartoons, they’d be ducking missiles of the stuff.

But “Men, Women & Children” isn’t a cartoon. It wants to be real, terribly.

Instead, it’s just terrible.