The Year of Regretful Fathers
[DISCLAIMER: Spoilers below for One Battle After Another and Sentimental Value]
One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic saga, is just one of many films released this year that center on the complexities and the conflicts of parenthood, not as a subplot or a secondary theme but as the centerpiece of the entire narrative. The main character, Bob Ferguson (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) is a reclusive hipster who finds himself in a crisis when his troubled past catches up to him and his daughter goes missing. Anderson’s film is an action comedy thriller about social justice and authoritarianism, but ultimately, it’s about generations. In fact, the film comes together with a hopeful outlook primarily because of the emotional core between father and daughter. The various themes converge with a final message about the importance of acknowledging our failures as parents and passing the torch to our children so the fight for a better and more just society can live on. Of course, Anderson’s messaging could be interpreted as a metaphor for our broader political and cultural climate right now, but it’s the prism of fatherhood that makes the message so effective.
But One Battle After Another is not the only film this year to examine fatherhood. Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value and Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly both follow successful men in the film industry (Stellan Skarsgård in the former and George Clooney in the latter), who navigate fractured relationships with their adult children. Unlike One Battle After Another, the family conflicts here are not reflections of larger societal themes. These are more intimate portraits of fathers, but nevertheless, like DiCaprio’s character, the men in these films are also coming to terms with the failure to meet their daughters’ emotional needs.
Sentimental Value is the most successful in the ways it pulls off the central patriarch’s redemption arc. Skarsgård’s character, Gustav Borg, achieves a long overdue reconciliation with his daughter Nora (played with effortless naturalism by Renata Reinsve) through an artistic collaboration. In Trier’s film, art heals what words cannot. Gustav may never have verbally unpacked all of the mistakes he made. The list is too long. However, he and Nora found their path to forgiveness, and the audience is left with the sense that these two characters have reached profound mutual understanding.
It’s not common to see patriarchs express this much vulnerability on screen or within their societal construct. What we’re seeing is a different kind of masculinity expressed by men of a certain age who are seeking to unburden themselves, and by extension their children, from their toxic generational flaws. It is worth noting that these three films are directed by men, all of whom are fathers themselves. Anderson, Trier, and Baumbach are all successful enough as filmmakers that they could direct projects about anything at this point. Yet, they all chose to structure their respective narratives around the redemptive arc of flawed fatherhood, perhaps their own.
The Year of Rebellious Mothers
[DISCLAIMER: Spoilers below for Die My Love and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You ]
If the fathers of contemporary cinema are expressing a softer side that goes against their archetype, the mothers are also defying societal norms but with more bite. Two films this year, Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love and Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, explore mothers we rarely see on screen. These women aren’t expressing regret for not stepping up to the plate for their families. Instead, they are expressing rage for losing their own identities after becoming parents.
The women at the center of these films deliver fearless performances as rebellious mothers, but the women behind the camera are rebelling as well. Whereas the majority of the fatherhood films follow classic screenplay structure, Ramsay throws all of that out the window in Die My Love. This is a true art film and a difficult watch, at that. Die My Love blurs the line between reality and fantasy while Grace (a ferocious Jennifer Lawrence) experiences psychosis not long after giving birth and settling down in the rural countryside.
We rarely see Grace “mothering” in the traditional sense, and that’s deliberate. While her husband works all day and doesn’t know how to deal with her emotions, Grace acts out. She licks a dirty window for seemingly no reason. She throws herself through a glass door. She scratches the walls of the bathroom with her bare, bruised hands (seemingly a nod to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper). There is little narrative structure in Die My Love, which is also deliberate. Ramsay forces the audience to watch how domesticity has made Grace unravel. The result is bleak and destructive, but that’s reflective of the impact of traditional gender roles and societal pressures.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You dabbles in abstractions as well, but even more impressively, it never shies away from the grim reality of what it means to be a caretaker. Bronstein’s highly personal film is loosely based on her own experiences living in a confined motel room with her young daughter for eight months while she underwent treatment for a physical illness. But this film is not about the daughter, and Bronstein employs various cinematic tools to establish empathy with the flawed woman at the center. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You makes the radical choice to never show the protagonist’s daughter because Linda herself cannot see her daughter figuratively. She has lost the joy of motherhood, having disappeared into the endless cycle of caretaking with a forever-absent husband and a growing sense of existential dread.
Bronstein’s directorial vision is heavily reliant on extremely tight close-ups of Rose Byrne’s face, demanding that the audience confront how the pressures of motherhood are destroying this woman. We see her respond to every trial and tribulation, every inconvenience both large and small. We also see her make terrible choices as a result. She leaves her daughter in the hotel alone at night, she crosses boundaries with her therapist, and in an excruciating climax, she defies professional medical advice. Yet for every flaw (and there are many), we understand Linda more than any parental figure in cinema this year.
If the vulnerability of fathers in the aforementioned films feels strangely new, so does the rage of the mothers in these projects. Both are refreshing because both involve a rejection of traditional gender roles as they relate to parenting expectations. If there is one throughline to the various portraits of the contemporary family in film today, it’s that parenthood is nearly impossible to get right. Moreover, the ways men and women have been taught to parent are not helping. Some of these stories are more triumphant than others. Some are not triumphant at all. However, they all feed into a collective desire to reevaluate and reenvision what a more productive and healthy mode of parenting might look like. Maybe next year, cinematic mothers and fathers will have figured it out.
via @FilmUpdates
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