A movie as generic as its title, Fathers & Daughters is really about one father and one daughter. Their stories are separated by 25 years, but each is struggling to cope with the same trauma. For Jake Davis (Russell Crowe), an acclaimed novelist living in New York at the end of the 1980s, grief manifests physically. The car accident that killed his wife has left him with severe brain damage, which causes seizures referred to by a doctor as “psychotic breaks.” When he checks into a mental health facility, his late wife’s sister (Diane Kruger) and her husband (Bruce Greenwood) step in to take care of his eight-year-old daughter, Katie (played as a child by Kylie Rogers). But seven months of electroshock therapy later, when Jake is released from the hospital, his callous in-laws aren’t ready to part with his daughter, and they begin to wage a legal battle for custody. Their ostensible concern is the welfare of the child, but the dead woman’s sister also blames Jake for the accident, and clearly harbors resentment.
This is intercut with scenes in the present day that follow Katie as an adult (played by Amanda Seyfried), who, though now a social worker and graduate student in psychology, is still emotionally crippled from her mother’s death as well as the implied death of her father somewhere in the interim. She routinely goes out drinking and picks up men for one-night stands, terrified of feeling anything real or becoming involved with someone who might leave just as suddenly as her parents. Enter Cameron (Aaron Paul), a sensitive Good Guy (and fan of her father’s final book), whose endless patience, compassion and support might just be enough to help Katie learn to love and be vulnerable with another person again.
Director Gabriele Muccino (The Pursuit of Happyness, Seven Pounds) has an established interest in stories of hardship and uplift, pain and redemption, and Fathers & Daughters bears all the usual hallmarks. There’s the fatal car accident right at the opening, which of course punctuates a petty marital argument meant to heighten the sense of regret later on; another awful piece of misery-porn from earlier this year, Demolition, opened in the same predictable way. There’s the subplot involving present-day Katie and a child (Quvenzhané Wallis), who’s also lost her mother and now refuses to speak; this sort of contrived parallelism also threatened to derail the recent Short Term 12, an otherwise-excellent therapy drama. There are the incredibly insensitive relatives, who resort to expensive litigation in order to seize custody of Katie and never show an ounce of concern for Jake’s hardly-improved condition; it isn’t inconceivable that people can be such bastards, but in this context they register as familiar, one-dimensional antagonists, and they sap the story of any moral nuance.
Screenwriter Brad Desch proves just as inept on a micro-level as he is with the broader concerns of story construction. His plodding, functional expository dialogue is truly painful to listen to. Within 30 seconds of entering the picture, Katie is told by a friend, “I can’t believe you’re getting a graduate degree in psychology!” Likewise, Jake’s final argument with his wife is full of many such blunt statements of fact that exist purely for the audience’s benefit. And good grief—later on, when Cameron reassures Katie that he’s not going to leave her, she replies, “I know that here,” and points to her head, “but not here,” and points to her heart. Fathers & Daughters does little to stimulate either.
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