BEFORE: Nicolas Cage carries over again from "Lord of War", and I think this sets me up pretty well for Father's Day, even though this is something of a Christmas story. But the bigger question you may be asking is, "Why is this film being included?" because I've spoken before about my distaste for the director of this film, not just for what made the news, but because of what happened back in college.
In fact I had a very public ban on the films of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, but since he directed segments of two anthology films I watched, "New York, I Love You" and "Movie 43", it turned out he'd been sneaking his way back into my countdown anyway over the last couple of years. And banning his films doesn't really work when this one provides a crucial link in my Father's Day chain, so I had to issue a waiver, begrudgingly, but it's either watch this film today or break the chain for 2020. And the chain is 175 films long already, it must be preserved above all else.
THE PLOT: A fast-lane investment broker, offered the opportunity to see how the other half lives, wakes up to find that his sports car and girlfriend have become a mini-van and wife.
AFTER: I really forgot that this movie was set at Christmastime, which might be a good thing in the long run. If I had saved this for December I might never have gotten around to crossing it off the list, God knows I've been trying to watch "Bad Santa 2" for several years now - that came out in 2016, but by the time I reach December, I'm usually either out of slots or I have so few left that I'll take any path that gets me from the end of the horror chain to anything Christmas-ey, and by that time I'm following where the linking leads me, and I'll take whatever I can get. So I punted instead and planned this for Father's Day, because the premise is that this guy who's never had kids suddenly has to be a husband and father, and I thought that might give some insight into what that means.
But it's not hard to see that "The Family Man" is really a stitched-together version of two holiday classics: "A Christmas Carol" and "It's a Wonderful Life", which if you think about it, meet at the intersection of introspection, regret through flashbacks and the interference of angels/ghosts. One might even think of those two holiday classics as opposite sides of the same coin, and by no means of coincidence, the lead characters are both in the banking industry and have to debate the importance of career and family. Ebenezer Scrooge chose career over family, and George Bailey went the other way. Jack Campbell in this film is on the "Scrooge" path, he's the president of an investment firm who's making his employees work on Christmas Eve because there's a big potential merger coming up, and he's disappointed when everyone's thinking about the holiday rather than work. He also gets a message from his old girlfriend, and that's probably what sparks his dream about the path not taken, what his life would be like today if they hadn't parted ways thirteen years ago.
Or is it? Campbell also defuses a tense situation with an armed gunman at a deli/convenience store, and it's strongly implied that because he did the right thing, that man rewards him with a look at a "glimpse" of what his life could have been. Now this man could be an angel or a devil, but casting an African-American actor brings that horrible "magical Negro" stereotype into play, which really has fallen out of favor in the past few years. I think the last film that got away with using that trope was "The Legend of Bagger Vance", released the same year as this one. Screenwriters since then have been trying to avoid falling back on this, I think. Anyway, "Cash" here somehow allows Campbell into the alternate reality where he came back early from his internship in London, and married his college girlfriend, who had tried to convince him to stay in New York.
In the alt-reality, he's not the high-powered executive with the Manhattan condo, Ferrari and high-paid escorts on speed-dial - he's got a house in New Jersey, a minivan, a wife and two kids. He works for his father-in-law selling tires, and he's got to somehow piece together his past, and figure out how he got there in order to have conversations without coming off like an idiot. And it's a long time before he can come around and find any reason why this is BETTER than the reality he was in before. Maybe if he'd spent more time bowling he'd fit in better in the suburbs. Obviously there's a larger question here about identity, do we become who we set out to be, or are we made up of our decisions, or a combination of the two? When we feel that we're not on the right path, do we make some kind of course correction or do we just shrug our shoulders and say, "Oh, well, I guess this is just who I am now?"
There is some sign of personal growth, Jack knows that none of what he is experiencing is real, so he could do anything he wants in this alternate reality, but when given the chance to have an affair with a neighbor, he passes it up, because he really wants to see if he's capable of being committed to the right person. And he similarly follows up with his old employer after a chance encounter with the CEO, since he still has all those executive skills, but given the chance to move his family into a Manhattan high-rise and get some semblance of his old life back within The Matrix, he soon realizes that his wife and kids just wouldn't fit in that world, so the weird message here is that you can be successful in your career or be happy with your family, but apparently you can't juggle both. (But, but, aren't there some people somewhere who do this?)
Still, Jack mostly comes off like an a-hole here, but any contention between him and his wife seems to come from the difference between them, that she's lived with him for thirteen years, and he hasn't lived with anyone for that long, including her. He just doesn't have the software needed to be a good husband, someone who's willing to compromise, do household chores like walking the dog or dropping the kids off at daycare. So of course he's going to hate that life, because he's just not used to it - he eventually comes around, but it's a long haul before he does. Then when the dream/glimpse/simulation is over, he tries to re-connect with Annie in the real world, but at this point I foresee the opposite problem - he's imagined their whole history together, but she's been living alone for the last 13 years, so if they do get together in the future, it's probably going to be an uphill climb for HER now.
I was surprised that the story contained something akin to genuine emotion, because I know first-hand that the film's director is incapable of thinking of anyone but himself, or displaying anything approaching empathy. So this must have come from the writers - or perhaps it's just a carry-over from those famous Christmas stories that they stole from.
Also starring Tea Leoni (last seen in "Spanglish"), Don Cheadle (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Makenzie Vega, Jeremy Piven (last seen in "Very Bad Things"), Lisa Thornhill (last seen in "Red Dragon"), Saul Rubinek (last seen in "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs"), Josef Sommer (last seen in "Shaft"), Harve Presnell (last seen in "The Unsinkable Molly Brown"), Mary Beth Hurt (last seen in "Untraceable"), Francine York, Amber Valletta (last seen in "Hitch"), Ken Leung (last seen in "The Squid and the Whale"), Kate Walsh (last seen in "Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House"), Gianni Russo, Tom McGowan (last seen in "True Crime"), Joel McKinnon Miller (last seen in "Just Like Heaven"), Ruth Williamson, John F. O'Donohue, Robert Downey Sr. (last seen in "Tower Heist"), Jake Milkovich, Ryan Milkovich.
RATING: 4 out of 10 funnel cakes at the mall
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