A few weeks ago I saw Richard Linklater’s daring, ingenious film Boyhood, in which a young boy experiences a primal need to create a fully operational, emotionally nurturing family to replace the dysfunctional one he inherited after his parents got divorced. The film, shot over a 12-year period, uses a single group of actors, including the director’s own daughter, who at one point asked her dad to kill off her character because she wanted out of the film. In Boyhood, new dads come and new dads go, but the hero’s biological father, played by Ethan Hawke, manages to occupy a central place in his daily life. He does so even though he eventually comes to realise that he will never reunite with his first wife (Patricia Arquette), in part because of a horrible moustache. This deceptively heartwarming film is thus about the corrosive effects of divorce and the need so many human beings experience to create a more satisfactory family unit because their original family vanished, imploded or simply let them down. And it is a film about the ways in which conventional family structures are jettisoned to compensate for the breakdown in the nuclear family.
Around the time I saw Boyhood, I also happened to take in Chef. The story focuses on Jon Favreau’s deposed celebrity chef, who goes back to basics to save himself from a failed marriage and a floundering career. It is a film about holding on to your dreams, fulfilling promises you made to yourself long ago, refusing to sell out. But on another, more affecting level, it is a film about a little kid who tries to reassemble his family after his parents divorce. Travelling all across the US in the back of a merry sandwich truck, living it up with Favreau and his plucky assistant (John Leguizamo), the kid demands that his father becomes an integral force in his life, not a glorified babysitter. Thanks in part to his efforts, his parents ultimately remarry. Chef is thus a film about the corrosive effects of divorce and the ways in which conventional family structures are jettisoned to compensate for the breakdown in the nuclear family.
Right around that time I also saw Guardians of the Galaxy, a film in which the hero needs to find an entirely new family after his mother dies and he gets abducted by astro-buccaneers. Soledad O’Brien, his eventual soulmate, also has problems with her family, as she is an orphan raised as a bloodthirsty assassin whose half-sister, a somewhat less successful bloodthirsty assassin, volunteers to kill her. So she’s looking for a new family, too. So is the brassy little mechanical raccoon Rocket (Bradley Cooper) and the monosyllabic anthropomorphic tree played, quite convincingly, by Vin Diesel. By the end of the film, the Guardians of the Galaxy are no longer some run-of-the-mill extraterrestrial gang or a wisecracking interstellar posse. They are a family.
This past summer, I also saw Maleficent – a film about a little girl whose family sends her away to live with fairies for the next 16 years, as a result of which she ends up adopting a witch as a surrogate mother – and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, where crusading reporter Megan Fox loses her crusading scientist dad when she’s just a tot, and is clearly looking for a new father figure. Unfortunately, the dad she chooses is that repellent old standby, William Fichtner. What she ends up with instead of a conventional replacement family are a bunch of zany siblings: four genetic mutations who think of a gigantic rat as their pater familias.
This pattern is hardly new. Earlier this year, in Three Days to Kill, a CIA contract killer and all-purpose psychopath (Kevin Costner) belatedly realises that his parenting skills may need some fine tuning. After all, he has missed most of his teenage daughter’s birthday parties because he was out of town assassinating someone. In the film, Hailee Steinfeld is cast as the quintessential bratty teen damaged by the corrosive effects of divorce. And in the murderously cloying Begin Again, Steinfeld is once again cast as a bratty teen hoping to patch up her divorced parents’ (Mark Ruffalo and Christine Keener) relationship. So it’s not as if I simply imagined Hollywood’s obsession with the disintegration of the family unit. And the corrosive effects of divorce.
I really enjoy films about the corrosive effects of divorce and the need to rejig the family unit to make it more cohesive. I love films such as The Way, Way Back and About a Boy and any other motion picture about surrogate dads or mums who replace the dud genetic dads and mums who bailed on their kids. Or died. But I think we might be dealing with a bit of overkill here. Not every movie can be about people trying to find a new family. Not every film can be about the corrosive effects of divorce. Every once in a while it would be nice to watch a film where the parents are not divorced and the kids are not trying to reunite them.
At last count, 41% of American marriages ended in divorce. Onscreen, the number is more like 95%. This may be because every screenwriter in Hollywood is a 25-year-old rich kid whose parents got divorced when he was 10. It’s the reason horror films are always about kids left at home at night. The kids’ parents are never there to confront the monster because one lives right upstairs and the other one lives in Phoenix. Together, they might be able to take down the serial killer or gigantic insect or vampire or deadly virus. Divorced, they are powerless.
This year, in particular, this routine just keeps coming at you. In new release The Skeleton Twins, Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig play twins who haven’t spoken to each other in years, in part because their horrible mother singlehandedly wrecked their childhood. Now they are trying to patch things up. Reconnect. Get the family rebooted. Damaged children also try to patch things up with dud parents in The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Isabelle Huppert plays an insensitive mother who tells her daughter Eleanor (Jessica Chastain), “I don’t want you to take our relationship too personally.” This is the same film in which the heroine’s father (William Hurt) tells his daughter that he once lost her in the ocean.
My own parents got divorced, after 30 years of pitiless warfare, so it’s not as if I am unfamiliar with this terrain. But I get tired of hearing about it. Every 18 years or so, Hollywood releases a film that isn’t about divorce, that isn’t about trying to create a new family to replace the one that let you down. Jaws, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 300. Alas, such movies are hard to find. Batman films are about a family that imploded. So are the Superman films. So is every other film you’re likely to see this millennium.
The other day, I went to see The November Man, in which the resilient Pierce Brosnan plays an affable sociopath lured out of retirement by a threat on the life of his ex-wife. By the end of the film, Brosnan has replaced his murdered, middle-aged wife with the younger, far more fetching, and still very much extant Olga Kurylenko, who presumably becomes the new mum to Brosnan’s traumatised teenage daughter. This stuff just won’t stop.
Before the film even started there was a trailer for This Is Where I Leave You (unhappy family reunites) and another for The Judge, where Robert Downey Jr plays a despicable, amoral, disowned son who tries to patch things up with his dad (Robert Duvall). Family is everything; wasn’t that a Walter White saying? The day I saw The November Man, there was also a trailer for the soon-to-be-released Dracula Untold. That is, Dracula Untold by Bram Stoker, But Re-Told By Some Other Guy. In it, as far as I can tell from the trailer, Vlad “The Impaler” Tepes, a peppery but outgunned Trans-Carpathian potentate, will sell his soul to the devil in exchange for prodigious supernatural powers that will enable him to polish off every marauding Turk within a 300-mile radius just by blowing on them. Does he do all this to save his country? His palace? His hide? No, he surrenders to the forces of evil and becomes the dreaded Count Dracula because it’s the only way he can keep his family intact.
I give up.
