Worrying aloud with A-list 'Men, Women & Children'

We shift and sweat and sleep in mile-long lines for Apple's newest iPhone. We burn through data plans, crunch e-mails, mining through Instagrams, Facebook feeds and tweets. We stare, pulses throbbing, at those three little dots on our text windows.

But what's happening to us in the process? With porn at the ready on "incognito" tabs, BDSM a jarring go-to for teens and Ashley Madison ads winking over one-click affairs, where are we headed?

In Men, Women & Children, director Jason Reitman shifts from his Oscar-nominated commentary on today's corporate culture in Up in the Air to take a hard look at what we — adults, teens and all in between — confront as a fully digitized society.

Reitman assembled a large ensemble for his portrayal, including Jennifer Garner as a helicopter mom going to extreme measures to stalk her daughter's (Kaitlyn Dever) online footprint, Adam Sandler and Rosemarie DeWitt as an unsatisfied married couple heading down separate digital alleyways toward affairs, and a raft of teenagers, including Ansel Elgort, dealing with an overstimulated cocktail of virtual gaming, online porn and pop culture-driven anorexia.

Garner is just starting down the computerized path with her brood, Violet, 8, Seraphina, 5, and Samuel, 2. "You start super restricted and as trust grows, freedom grows," she says during a Paste BN roundtable with the cast.

Sandler grins. "Is that your character talking?" he asks.

"I am a little bit like Patricia," admits Garner, whose character goes so far as to print out weekly transcripts of her daughter's online chats. "In my heart, I definitely could go that direction. Just like, 'You never need to have access to the Internet!' "

Reitman nods. "It's tricky though, because you have a device that is becoming so integrated into schoolwork," he says, "that by the time you're leaning into junior high, you're using this device for everything you're doing at school, and it's hard to separate it from anything else you want to do on it."

But how much surveillance is too much? Elgort, who plays a depressed teen who submerges himself into virtual gaming, was an independent early on as he grew up in New York, taking the subway alone at 11. Dever recalls getting her first cellphone at 10, but "I could only call my parents and nothing else," she says.

Reitman has gone full-court with his daughter, Josie, 8. He only recently took the baby monitor camera out of her room. "I was just making sure she's all right," he says, hands up. "Making sure she's asleep. Making sure she's not up reading a book in the middle of the night."

"But don't you remember being up reading a book in the middle of the night?" asks DeWitt, who favors more of an old-school style as a new mom to Gracie, 1.

"Sometimes you just want to see that her lung is moving," he shrugs.

DeWitt is all for safety, but "I very much want her to be part of this world that we're living in," she says. "I don't want to take her out of it. I'd like her not to fall down crazy rabbit holes, but it's her destiny and her life. I'm just the container. I'm not controlling her ship."

"I'm the marionette," quips Garner, making everyone laugh.

But, as Elgort points out, when you're savvy, there's a way around everything — even vigilant parents. "That's why kids want to be on Snapchat (a popular messaging service that sends pictures that dissolve in seconds). They don't want to be where their parents are at. You can be a good parent without being too overbearing."

Mitigating online exposure has become even murkier in today's celebrity culture. This year, some news organizations, such as Reuters, the Associated Press and People magazine, and pop-culture blogs attempted to self-regulate for the first time, agreeing not to publish unauthorized photos of celebrities' children, in what became known as the #NoKidsPolicy. The results have been drastic.

"I can't put into words how different my life is from before January 1" when a law banning the harassment of celebrity children by paparazzi was passed in California, says Garner. "I think everyone, including the paparazzi, knew it had gotten to an absurd (point)." For 10 years, she says, up to 20 cars used to sit idly on her street, waiting for her and her children. "I would hide in the bottom of a workman's truck and he would drive me out to a car I'd would have hidden in the middle of the night. Just to try to go somewhere."

And then this fall, in the wake of a new civility came a rash of nude female celebrity photos, with hackers releasing private images of close to 100 stars, from Jennifer Lawrence to Kate Upton. Most of the women, it appears, had deleted such photos from their phones, but were unaware of their existence in the iCloud's digital afterlife. "I immediately turned off my iCloud," says Elgort.

This is the time, says Reitman, for Men, Women & Children to force the hard questions. "We're in a kind of choose-your-own-adventure moment of humanity" as far as what opportunities the Internet has given us, says the director.

"It's a very realistic movie," says Sandler. "There's a lot of stuff in there that is happening and can happen. I think it's great that it's being displayed and giving you that nauseous feeling and making you tense. You leave the theater saying, 'That can happen. Let's not let it happen.'"