By Richard Winters
My Rating: 4 out of 10
4-Word Review: Estranged father comes back.
Nora (Marsha Mason) is a single mother living with her 15-year-old son Michael (Matthew Broderick) who’s struggling to make ends meet as a High School English Teacher. Things become particularly desperate when her beat-up 1964 Volvo car gets stolen and she no longer has any transportation to get to work nor the money to afford buying a new car, or even a used one. Fortunately, the officer working on the case, Brian (Donald Sutherland) takes a liking to her and offers her to use his motorbike even though she needs training on how to drive it. Once she goes through the crash course and begins using it she still has other financial concerns to worry about until one night she receives a mysterious visitor, which turns-out to be her estranged father Max Dugan (Jason Robards) who ran-out on his family 29 years earlier. Now he has returned with a briefcase full of $687,000, which he skimmed from a crooked casino that he used to work at. He tells her he has only 6-months to live and advises her to take the money, so that she and her son can live stress-free, but Nora isn’t so sure she wants to accept it, so Max goes about buying her stuff anyways including a fancy new car.
This has to be one of Neil Simon’s least imaginative efforts and the concept seems so contrived it’s like he thought it up for the 10-minutes that he was sitting on the john. I’ll admit when I was a teen and watched it when it first came out, I enjoyed it. I especially remembered the scenes dealing with Charley Lau, who regrettably died less than a year after the film’s release, where he plays himself the hitting coach for the Chicago White Sox baseball team, who Max hires to help Michael become a better hitter and these teaching scenes I found to be engaging. Unfortunately, the foundational premise has a lot of holes.
The idea that a father would suddenly want to see his daughter after 29 years of being away didn’t seem authentic. If he longed to reconnect then why not reach out earlier? Granted he was in jail for 6 of those years, but what about the other 23? If family was so important to him then why run out on them in the first place? Why doesn’t he at least make some attempts in-between those years to communicate like sending letters of phone calls before just showing up and expecting to be welcomed with open arms? The idea of throwing her and his grandson a lot of money comes-off in bad taste like he’s simply trying to buy their love and if anything seems quite shallow. During those 29 years away you’d think he would’ve met other people he’d become friends with, or other women he dated that he might’ve wanted to give the money to instead, or are we to presume that for 3-decades he lived in a cave and made no contact with anyone else?
I didn’t get why Nora didn’t recognize her father when he called. Yes, it had been awhile since she had last heard or seen him, it’s stated that she was 9 when he left, but he has a distinctive voice, so I’d think it would set something off in the back of her brain that she knows who this is, but can’t quite place it, versus having her immediately call the police in panic after getting a call from some ‘strange man’. He also tells her at one point that he may not actually be Max Dugan, but again she wasn’t a month-old infant when she last saw him, but instead someone entering the fourth grade, which should’ve given her a solid enough memory of what he looked like and thus know if this was her real father, or not.
To help solve all of this Nora should’ve been made a divorcee instead of a widow. The husband/father could’ve been the one who went to jail and then returned a 6 years later with stolen money hoping to use it to win back his wife’s and son’s favor. It would’ve made more sense because less time would’ve passed, and he’d have a more vested emotional interest in bonding with his son since he was directly his versus an elusive grandfather who didn’t even know the kid existed until being ‘tipped off’ that Nora had one by some secondary source.
Matthew Broderick’s character is problematic too. He seems just too obedient and goody-goody to be a believable teen as he promptly makes his bed every morning, even his mother’s, asks to be excused from the dinner table, and even lets his mother kiss him while in full view of his friends. Yes, there’s one brief moment where he tries to sneak a smoke, but otherwise I didn’t detect the typical rebellion to authority that most teens that age have, and it would’ve been improved had the kid been 9 or 10 where still being compliant with their parents’ wishes is a little more understandable.
Sutherland’s character was off as well as he seems way too aggressive about asking out a woman that he had just met while on-duty and actively investigating her case making it ethically questionable whether he should even be doing it. If a guy does come-on to a woman so quickly, simply because she’s attractive and single, as he knew nothing else about her, you’d presume he’s done this to other available women as well and thus should have a throng of casual girlfriends and Nora would just be one of many. The film should’ve just had him already her boyfriend from the start and thus avoided this otherwise awkward and rushed relationship. I also thought it was dumb that Kiefer Sutherland, who appears early on in a brief non-speaking role as one of Broderick’s friends, wasn’t cast as Donald’s son in the climactic baseball sequence at the end and instead the part was given to another young actor.
Spoiler Alert!
The money issue becomes yet another problem as Max spends it on so many lavish gifts that I started to wonder if there would be any left to put into savings. The idea that he could’ve had workers refurbish the house in just one day while Nora and son where in school is ridiculous as something that massive would take weeks if not months. He even ends up driving away with the car he had bought her leaving her again without a vehicle. Yes, he does open-up a bank account in her name and puts in $400,000, but her cop boyfriend was already aware of this and made clear he put his duty to uphold the law over his personal relationships making it very probable that she’d be forced to give it all back. Worse she might be considered an accomplice forcing her to hire an attorney, which would’ve sent her into even more debt making it seem like she’d be better off had the whole thing not even happened to begin with.
My Rating: 4 out of 10
Released: March 25, 1983
Runtime: 1 Hour 38 Minutes
Rated PG
Director: Herbert Ross
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube
Scopophilia 