BEFORE: At last, I've reached the end of the Father's Day chain - it turned out to be 10 films over the course of three weeks, that's a pretty healthy examination of the topic of fathers of all kind - I'm sure there will be more films about fathers to come, but this is a good stopping point, now just one more film tomorrow and then I can start the Doc Block where I want to, and it will be synched up to have some appropriate films on and around July 4, and then I'll pay tribute to some fallen comedians and other famous people, I'll include a few rock concert films and we'll have the whole doc (and rock) thing wrapped up before the 2nd week of August. It's going to be another hot Doc summer, I can tell.
Bobby Cannavale carries over again from "Old Dads".
THE PLOT: A stand-up comedy writer navigates the complexities of living with his father while co-parenting his autistic son with his former spouse. He grapples with hurdles as he balances family responsibilities and his career.
AFTER: This is a movie that went through a couple of different titles, originally it was called "Inappropriate Behavior", then in some countries it was released as "Standing UP", which was not a terrible pun, a reference to both stand-up comedy and the fact that Ezra's father is standing up for him and trying to do the right thing for him.
In his own way, of course, it's very difficult for Max, a comedy writer, to know what the right thing to do is where his autistic son, Ezra, is concerned. When we first meet the characters here, Max and Jenna are divorced and co-parenting, Jenna has a boyfriend, Bruce, and Max takes his son Ezra out to events and then sneaks him into the Manhattan comedy clubs later, not only to show him his world but because he calls Ezra his "good luck charm", his "mojo man". This can get awkward (and does) because Max includes stories about his autistic son in his stand-up act. I guess maybe he does a different set when he knows his son is in the audience?
It's hard for any parent to know how to raise an autistic child (or "neurodivergent" or "on the spectrum" or whatever the current preferred euphemism is these days. We still don't know exactly what autism is or what causes it, we just know it's on the rise. Or maybe as a society we all just got better at diagnosing it, who can say? Some people say it's vaccines, but I think if it were that simple, it would be easily proven (or disproven) so I suspect it's something more complex than that, it's just that the people who are SURE of that without the data to back it up are just very vocal about it. Some people say it's chemtrails, but those people also wear foil hats and think that fluoride is turning the frogs gay. You know, like our Secretary of Health and Human Services thinks. This is the same guy who talks to crows, left a dead bear carcass in Central Park as a joke, and drove home from the beach once with a big whale head on top of his car - do we really want to believe THIS guy about vaccines causing autism? Whatever this nut job believes, I automatically want to believe the opposite.
Max thinks the best place for Ezra is a public school, where he can meet a greater variety of kids, and get more of an understanding about the world. But his ex-wife wants to send Ezra to a special-needs school, and after an incident where Ezra tried to run across town at night and tell his father something, and got hit by a taxi, a doctor wants to put him on a new drug and also supports the idea of a special-needs school. Max's outburst and physical threat against that doctor gets him put under a restraining order, so he can't see his own son for three months.
Believing that he has no other choice, and wanting to remove his son from a "toxic" environment, Max then kidnaps his own son, despite Max's father trying to talk him out of it. Max drives with Ezra all the way to Michigan to visit an old friend, then while he's there he gets the call from the Jimmy Kimmel show, that they want him in L.A. to be on the show the following Friday. Well, they're already on a road trip, what's another few thousand miles? But it's just not going well, Ezra wants to go home and is uncomfortable on the road, uncomfortable eating with metal utensils, uncomfortable being hugged or touched. Ezra is uncomfortable a lot, it seems. Also Ezra's mother has tried to keep his disappearance quiet, however when she does mention it to the authorities, it forces them to send out an Amber alert.
Max's ex-wife and father team up to drive to Michigan and find them before the police do, but Max and Ezra are already on the road to Nebraska, where Max grew up and where his father separated from his mother, also he's got another family friend there, Grace, who runs a horse farm, and Ezra does enjoy petting a horse, eating ice cream and spending time with Grace's daughter, Ruby. Max and Ezra leave Nebraska and run into Max's father at a truck stop, but by this time Max's father has had a change of heart, he blames himself for not sticking with his son years ago, and says that he admires Max for sticking his neck out for Ezra and trying to do what's right.
Max and Ezra make it to Los Angeles, visit the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and get ready for Max's appearance on the Jimmy Kimmel Show - but federal agents are already there, waiting for them, I guess it wasn't too hard to figure out where Max was heading when all they had to do was watch ABC's promos for who was appearing on the Kimmel Show that week. Better luck next time, I guess.
I suppose this is as authentic as a film can be on this topic - the screenwriter, Tony Spiridakis, based the story on his relationship with his own autistic son and the break-up of his marriage when his son was a teenager. What he learned over time was that he didn't need to "fix" his son's condition. The actor who plays Ezra, William Fitzgerald, also has the condition, and also one of Robert De Niro's seven children does, too. Well, you can't say that people associated with this movie didn't do their research.
Directed by Tony Goldwyn (director of "The Last Kiss")
Also starring Robert De Niro (last seen in "Killers of the Flower Moon"), Rose Byrne (last seen in "Juliet, Naked"), William A. Fitzgerald, Vera Farmiga (last seen in "The Many Saints of Newark"), Whoopi Goldberg (last seen in "Till"), Rainn Wilson (last seen in "The Meg"), Tony Goldwyn (last seen in "Insurgent"), Geoffrey Owens (last seen in "Somewhere in Queens"), Alex Plank, Matilda Lawler, Tess Goldwyn, Sophie Mulligan, Daphne Rubin-Vega (last seen in "Tick, Tick...Boom!"), Ella Ayberk, Dov Davidoff (last seen in 'Hustlers"), Emma Willmann, Greer Barnes (last seen in "Joker"), Meg Hennessy, Lois Robbins (last seen in "Motherhood"), Barzin Akhavan, Jacqueline Nwabueze, Myra Lucretia Taylor (last seen in "See You Yesterday"), David Marciano (last seen in "Red State"), Amy Sheehan, Donna Vivino, Eddie A. Bryant, Joshua Hinck (last seen in "Admission"), Zoe Cali, Jackson Frazer (last seen in "Clifford the Big Red Dog"), John Donovan Wilson, Thomas Duverné, Jennifer Plotzke, Joe Pacheco, Mia Caro, Jimmy Kimmel (last seen in "Money Shot: The Pornhub Story"), Guillermo Rodriguez
RATING: 6 out of 10 glasses of pineapple juice
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