This month, over Father’s Day weekend, Disney releases Toy Story 3, the much-anticipated third installment in the groundbreaking Pixar series that made childhood icons of Woody the cowboy and Buzz Lightyear. Early buzz on the threequel suggests it is good if not brilliant, and I’m moderately enthused about seeing it; I might even wind up taking my family to see it on opening weekend. There is, though, something ironic about marking Father’s Day with an installment in an animated series revolving around a household headed by a single mother, with a boy named Andy (and his kid sister) growing up fatherless.
Pixar has given us two of the most sympathetic and well-developed father figures in recent family-film history: the widowed Marlin in Finding Nemo and the family-man Mr. Incredible in The Incredibles. In Ratatouille, on the other hand, the human protagonist and his father never knew one another, while the rat protagonist’s father is one of the movies’ most familiar paternal stereotypes, the old-school, reactionary authoritarian who regards his progeny’s unique aspirations with dismissive incomprehension (though, like many such fathers, he is redeemed by a third-act breakthrough).
Last year’s Pixar release, Up, featured an elderly widower, Carl Fredrickson, who becomes a surrogate father figure (or grandfather figure) to a young boy named Russell, who lives with his single mother and is initially in some denial about the neglect and unreliability of his absentee father, who is with another woman. Russell’s fond memories of trivial moments spent with his father, and his wishful anticipation of his father being there for him at special events when deep down he knows he won’t, is one of the most melancholy evocations of the absent father in any family film since E.T.
Films like Up and E.T., though hard on individual fathers, are acutely conscious of the importance of the father, of the tragedy of paternal abandonment and the loss of the intact family. Other “broken family films” are less poignant in this regard, from Tim Robbins’ matter-of-fact acceptance of part-time parent status in Zathura to Ben Stiller’s inability to accept and cope with the post-divorce reality in Night at the Museum. Going further back, there’s the post-marital snarkiness of the first Santa Clause movie and ultimately the paternal buffoonery of Mrs. Doubtfire, which ends with a homily for the children about why it’s better for Mommy and Daddy to live separately, but love still binds them all together.
Looking beyond family films, fatherhood has taken some hard knocks lately on the big screen. This year features a pair of romantic comedies, May’s The Back-up Plan and August’s The Switch, about women who conceive by that most unromantic means, artificial insemination. Along with Up, last year’s Best Picture nominees included Precious—a nightmare story about a monstrous father who abuses his teenaged daughter, impregnating her twice—and the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, with its über-failure father.
THE SEARCH FOR THE IDEAL FATHER
Does the Hollywood of today have a problem portraying strong, effective father figures? That question was recently put to me by an interviewer, with the parenthesis “such as Atticus Finch or Captain von Trapp.” The examples chosen, both from the 1960s, highlight the problem of the search for Hollywood’s ideal father figure. Both characters are widowers, to begin with—no fault of their own, surely, but it would be a melancholy thing if fathers appear at their best only where there are no mothers.
