A new trailer has been released for a movie adaptation of Stephen Amidon’s Kirkus-starred 2004 novel Human Capital. The film, shown at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, will have its U.S. premiere on March 20, and it stars Liev Schreiber, Marisa Tomei, Peter Sarsgaard, Hereditary’s Alex Wolff, Stranger Things’ Maya Hawke, and Upgrade’s Betty Gabriel.
The book tells a tale that Kirkus’ review hailed as being “in the towering tradition of Dreiser.” Drew Hagel, who owns a real-estate firm, is in difficult financial straits, leading him to make questionable investments with hedge-fund manager Quint Manning, whose own wife, Carrie, is deeply unsatisfied with her life. Drew’s teenage daughter, Shannon, breaks up with Quint’s son, Jamie, who has a drinking problem, and takes up with the troubled Ian Warfield, who’s on probation. Ian, Jamie, and Shannon are soon involved in an accident that throws all the characters’ worlds into chaos. Kirkus called the novel “richly complex and genuinely tragic, painfully cognizant of the lethal interaction among human weakness, skewed societal values, and the random blows of fate.”
The film’s director, Marc Meyers, is best known for writing and directing the 2017 film adaptation of Derf Backderf’s Kirkus-starred graphic-memoir My Friend Dahmer, about the author’s high-school friendship with future serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. That film also featured Wolff, as Backderf.
Human Capital’s screenwriter, Oren Moverman, wrote and directed a 2017 film version of Herman Koch’s novel The Dinner, which was named as one of Kirkus’ Best Books of 2013.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
