Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

Just a quick note about the movie I saw last Sunday afternoon, The Boys Are Back:

On the plus side, it's well-acted, moving, avoids a cheap or easy 'Hollywood' ending involving some new romantic relationship for the dad, and actually made me feel good about my housekeeping, in comparison to the state the hero's house was in for most of the film.

On the negative side, though I was willing to buy the father's good relationship with his two sons in the context of this particular movie, as soon as the lights went up at the end of the closing credits, my first thought (and almost the title for this review) was, "Kid, Don't Try This at Home!"

Did anybody else see this film and feel that the father's friend Laura was kind of RIGHT in saying that Joe's "Just say yes!" approach to being a single father might be more about lazy parenting than good parenting? Did anybody else find Joe's summing up at the end, about how they were three guys living without a female presence in the house and getting along fine, just a little bit a) self-serving and b) disingenuous (considering that Joe was actually getting quite a bit of help from his mother-in-law and his good friend Laura, all along)?

Maybe what really crept under my skin and bugged me about the character Clive Owen played in this film is that he reminded me of my own father when I was a young child and Dad was an undiagnosed and untreated manic-depressive.

My dad used to be 'fun' like Joe was when he was manic or fighting off the onset of one of his depressive phases -- he'd let us do things that were actually quite dangerous and gave my mother fits, sometimes (ducking under the guard rail and climbing on rocks around Niagara Falls comes to mind, right off, and he'd have responded just the way Clive Owen's character did in that opening scene where he's driving along the beach and enraging all the other adults in sight), and he'd often go too far in playing scary boogey-man and actually SCARE us to the point of crying, as Owen's character did at one point in the kids' party scene.

I guess I couldn't quite escape the sense that this movie was being told from Joe's side of things, and though it didn't really villify any of the other, more traditional-minded adults in the story, I kept thinking to myself that this is how my own dad remembers and talks about my childhood, and he's always so puzzled when I tell him that I remember being worried and frightened and depressed, thinking I had to act like a grown-up and take care of dad sometimes. He's genuinely shocked to learn that, from my side of things, the anxiety and fear far out-weighed the funnier moments (and that what he considered funny, I often considered mean and un-empathetic).

Even though in the film, Harry -- the older son from Joe's first marriage -- ends up seeming quite happy living with Joe and with his little half-brother Artie in Australia, in their mostly free-for-all domestic scene, I may have identified with him too much 10 minutes earlier in the film, when he said that he'd gone back to England because his father Joe had scared him.