BEFORE: Perhaps it would have made sense to go to "Moonlight" next, with both Janelle Monae and Mahershala Ali carrying over - and I do have access to an Academy screener of that Oscar-winning film. But unfortunately that film's a dead end right now, there would be nothing else to link to, and then I'd have a break in the chain right before Father's Day. It's a shame, because I think that film could have been a nice tie-in here to Pride Week, but the linking's telling me that it just wasn't meant to be, not now anyway. So I'm going to have to table that and try to circle back to it, perhaps when I add "A Wrinkle in Time" and find another potential link. Instead I'll carry on with the chain that gets me to the next two holidays.
Jim Parsons carries over from "Hidden Figures" into Father's Day film #4. After "Winter Passing", "Kodachrome", and "Fences", there's clearly a theme within a theme. Can you spot it? I'm dying to tell you what it is, or maybe I just did.
THE PLOT: A struggling actor, father and husband finds himself at a major crossroads, which forces him to examine his life, his family and his career.
AFTER: Everything's sort of connected in this film, in which the main character goes through several crises that are touched off by his father's ill health. His father has been paying for his two kids to go to private Hebrew school, and when he decides to spend his money on an experimental medical treatment, that means he can't cover tuition any more, so that means the son has to pull his kids out of the expensive school, and that means he's got to home-school them AND take care of his father AND try to get his brother to reconcile with their father AND still sneak off to an audition or two. Let's hope nothing goes wrong at his wife's job - whoops, I spoke too soon. Once the dominoes start toppling here, it's impossible to prevent them all from falling.
But maybe this is how people feel sometimes, when things aren't going right and show no signs of turning around any time soon. Perhaps we might feel that things should find a way to work out, even if that way isn't very clear at the time. During those times we depend on our family, spend time with the people we love, and cherish our relationships, while at the same time trying to realize that all of them are temporary in a sense.
The main character has a couple of "Brazil"-like fantasy sequences, stemming from childhood fantasies where he and his brother pretended to be futuristic astronaut sword-wielding heroes, but unfortunately these sequences don't really have much of a narrative of their own, and just barely reflect what's going on in the real world, so ultimately they have almost no impact on the overall story. It would have been nice if they were somehow more connected to what was going on in this man's life. I guess you could say that he play-acted as a kid, then he grew up to be an actor, so maybe he is living out his childhood dream in a way, but this feels like a little too much of a stretch.
His brother, meanwhile, has no ambition other than to build a kick-ass spaceman costume for Comic-Con, all so he can impress the nerdy girl who lives next to his trailer, who's attending the same Comic-Con in a "furry" costume. I'm conflicted by this part of the story, because it sort of lumps all the nerdy stereotypes about cosplayers into one too-tidy package, which isn't to say that those stereotypes aren't true, but making these sweeping generalizations about Comic-Con nerds seems a bit too simple, painting them all with the same brush. Nerds are lazy, nerds have no ambition, nerds are "losers" - I'm sure some of them are, but certainly not all. Some nerds are very successful, as we saw yesterday in "Hidden Figures", and in real life many of them are gainfully employed in important fields. Then there's the easy fallback on "furries" as if they're all sexual deviants - I'm sure some of them are, but there are sexual freaks in all walks of life, lots of people are kinky in some way, and not all people who dress in furry costumes are just doing it to get laid. Not everyone who goes to Comic-Con or dresses as a superhero or spaceman is doing it to get laid, either, although probably some of them are. It just shouldn't be portrayed as the primary motivation to dress in costume, that's not accurate.
(It pained me to see scenes set at the San Diego Comic-Con, knowing that I won't be there this year, for the first time in 14 or 15 years. Sure, I can lose myself in my Summer Rock Concert series of films, but after so many trips there, I'm know going to feel that urge to get on a plane and fly across the country to sit in a booth for 4 days and watch the circus go by. I'll have to keep reminding myself that it's a long event, a week out of my life that earns me very little money, and aggravates me to no end, and it's just been getting harder for me to do each year.)
There's a lot more to unpack here, like issues of work-place harassment, home-schooling vs. public school, following one's dreams vs. earning a living. Finding your bliss doesn't seem to be very easy when there are all these barriers in the way, like a cubicle mate who's a real douchebag or a deadbeat brother who can't seem to get his life together. Or your daughter shaved her head to get some attention, and your son is learning bad words from you filling up the swear jar. If all that is going down, though, I'm not sure that the best solution is to take your kids camping instead of teaching them geometry, and hoping for some kind of epiphany to strike. (Or putting them to work scraping swimming pools instead of enrolling them in public school, for that matter...) I mean, yeah, when life gets tough it's better to treat yourself well than to consider giving up, but at some point I think you have to just buckle down and get a job, right?
Also starring Zach Braff (last seen in "Oz the Great and Powerful"), Kate Hudson (last seen in "Le Divorce"), Joey King (last seen in "Going in Style"), Pierce Gagnon (last seen in "A Merry Friggin' Christmas"), Mandy Patinkin (last seen in "Yentl"), Josh Gad (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express"), Ashley Greene (last seen in "Butter"), Alexander Chaplin, Allan Rich (last seen in "Betsy's Wedding"), Michael Weston, Mark Thudium, Matt Winston, Bruce Nozick, Cody Sullivan, with cameos from Bob Clendenin (last seen in "Moonlight Mile"), Donald Faison (last seen in "Kick-Ass 2"), James Avery (last seen in "The Brady Bunch Movie"), Leslie David Baker.
RATING: 5 out of 10 roasted marshmallows
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