Nostalgia used to be the sport of grandparents, and before that, homesick soldiers (it was diagnosed in 18th c. Switzerland as a disease). Recently, though, it has it taken on a whole new function – as a security blanket for a generation of thirty- and fortysomethings who, for the first time in history, locate themselves by looking back instead of forward. In tragicomic fashion, it defines our main character, Alby Cutrera, whose whimsical, disabling desire to relive his childhood is nothing short of pathological.

Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. And for Alby, it’s the ransom to any kind of life.

I look around and see GI Joe conventions, cartoon networks, and adult kickball leagues. I see upscale restaurant menus that serve mini-hamburgers and macaroni and cheese. All in good fun, perhaps, but as someone who worked in advertising where office toy collections are de rigeur, I can tell you there’s something else going on, too. What used to be the stuff of mid-life crises and geriatric reminiscences is now a lifestyle choice for people who, if you were to ask my father’s generation, should know better.

Alby is an extreme case, a man whose unwillingness to divest his toys and gilded memories is more than just an affectation. But his predicament still begs the question, what in the Scooby Doo is this all about? Why are we clinging so desperately to the past?

Is it because we had such thorough, Kodachrome-enhanced documentation of our adolescent years? Or did we wash up on the wave of permissive, post-“Greatest Generation” parenting? I’m Ok-You’re ok, let him do his own thing, he needs to express himself, spare the rod anti-discipline, with none of the usual markers – war, privation, social pressures – into adulthood?

Is responsibility really so scary? Or did our toy collections simply kick ass?

Whatever the reasons for Alby’s rear-view of things, the umbilical cord connecting his past to his present (and future) was not cleanly clipped, leaving him in a world of dislocation, confusion, and happy-go-lucky demi-existence. A chronic case of nostalgia is akin to what ails zombies: they are neither dead nor alive, but instead wandering the earth in a perpetual state of self-elusion. Alby’s Crayola-colored purgatory is darkness in a candy-coated shell.

Alby’s more evolved boyhood pal Elias, whom he seeks out in a moment of wishful salvation, becomes the obstacle to his return – and ultimately, his antidote: living, breathing proof that simpler times were not so simple. The wounded, equally-stunted romantics Alby meets along the road during his and Elias’s reunion trip to Diggityland (a place that nourishes the fantasy of never-ending play) each pulls back the curtain a little farther, exposing the mutant, Oz-like infant within.

Nostalgia is as problematic a plaything for a filmmaker as it is for Alby, a Pandora’s Box of camp and kitsch, a gateway to retro-reverie style and insubstance that’s easy to get lost in. That’s why, for all the frivolity in Full Grown Men, it was important to underscore every melody with melancholy, to distress every smiley-faced facade with peeling paint, so that you’re never sure if the sandbox is really quicksand, and so that the tension between past and future is always palpably present.

Nostalgia is a theme park of lost illusions, a love that can only survive as a long-distance relationship, and perhaps most acutely with regard to our story, a guilt-free homecoming. Unreflected nostalgia breeds monsters, and Alby is at times monstrous in his refusal to abdicate his childlike domain.

A friend of mine is fond of saying that today’s mid-life crisis is getting married and having kids; that, instead of Corvettes and cheap affairs, the men of our times embrace maturity in a sudden, convulsive act of panicked recognition. Alby’s recognition is not paroxysmic, but one hopes, it is lasting; the beginning of a beginning for a man who almost never made it back.

– David Munro