A Family Man
A Family Man is a film where one of those fast talking, 40-something, upper middle class husbands and fathers who works too much and doesn’t appreciate the simple things in life suffers a terrible twist of fate then changes his tune. There are some great films that tell this story; many more watchable but forgettable ones; so many bad ones that we’d better not start listing them here or we might not know where to stop.
The better examples of this kind of movie can feel like veiled apologies by hard driving Hollywood types (or the money people who employ them) for spending too much time on the set, in the studio boardroom, at the strip club, etc.; they ultimately rise or fall on their artistry; the less artistry there is, the more phony and self-serving the movie seems.
This one, directed by Mark Williams from a screenplay by former corporate headhunter Bill Dubuque, falls somewhere between categories two and three. It’s not great but it’s not terrible either; mostly bearable but sometimes insufferable; you might sit through it if you were wrapped in a blanket on a couch and weren’t as thirsty or hungry or in need of a bathroom break as you were inclined to get up.
The photography is excellent; the direction is competent enough to pass muster on most cable TV dramas; there are several sparkling performances in supporting roles. But the script veers between convincing, largely silent moments of interaction between characters and cringe inducing spells it all out dialogue scenes. And unfortunately Gerard Butler has been miscast as Dane Jensen.
That last error is nobody’s fault but Butler’s. Seeking to prove his versatility after years of global superstardom in action blockbusters (300 , Olympus Has Fallen and its sequels), he embraced this script, used his clout to get it made and took an executive producer credit on the finished product a tale that should warm the hearts of movie buffs who love it when an actor known for one kind of role blossoms in something different; the gold standard is Burt Lancaster, a brawny sex symbol in film noir, action films, war pictures and Westerns who successfully cast himself against type in dramas that he co-produced, including the classic Sweet Smell of Success, in which he donned horn rimmed glasses and played many of his scenes while sitting at a table in a restaurant.
Butler isn’t Lancaster. As Dane, he’s all 1980s-’90s Michael Douglas: He spits out cynical acidic monologues into telephones and boardrooms, his puffed-up torso and arms straining against tight jackets and ties before going home to cuddle with cute kids Ryan (Max Jenkins) and Laura (Julia Butters), flirt or fight with wife Elise (Gretchen Mol), who loves him but wishes he’d hang out more with the family he supposedly adores.
Then a kind but blunt oncologist named Dr. Singh (Anupam Kher) tells the Jensens that Ryan has leukemia and might not live, and the movie turns into a message melodrama that basically crossbreeds the Ebenezer Scrooge and Bob Cratchit plots in “A Christmas Carol” and makes poor Tiny Tim sorry, young Mr. Jensen the change agent by scaring us into thinking he’ll end up as a ghost.
You have to be astonishingly skilled, likable and convincing to put over a role like this one. And you absolutely have to put it over, because if the actor who’s at the center of nearly every scene in a moralistic tearjerker isn’t dazzling in every frame, then the movie just lies there radiating anxious boredom, like a dog that wants to go outside but can’t get anyone’s attention. Butler does his best; it’s never good enough to make you stop wondering what someone else might have done with this part.
In almost all scenes, he is not persuasive; except when life smacks him down and forces him to think about what just happened to him. In the “Master of the Universe” sequences where he’s hustling people, teaching overeager underlings and competing in a ruthless contest (Dane’s boss, played by Willem Dafoe, sets him up against a co-worker, played by Alison Brie, with the promise that he’ll make whoever wins the sales contest general manager), he’s meant to be mesmerizingly suave and shifty though this material might have been thrillingly disgusting if it had been played by Douglas or Denzel Washington or Robert Downey Jr. or some other devilish charmer; but Butler never brings it to life because too often he comes off as hard edged and self-involved, like one of those fast talking lunkheads you’d try to avoid at a party.
He has two default expressions: a determined scowl and a furrowed brow “What does this mean?” Mol partly humanizes Butler in these domestic scenes almost heroically so given what little she’s working with; this is the kind of suffering wife part where an actress has to say “Even when you’re here, you’re not really here” but there’s only so much that she, Dafoe and company can do.
There are a few smart, heartfelt even heart-wrenching moments in “A Family Man,” such as when Elise tells her husband that he wants to keep alive a child who might not make it because he feels guilty about his own absence. (Accusations like those hit close enough to home that they could cause parents in the audience to shudder.)
There are other less-urgent scenes that also ring true for example when Dane declares himself “a goddamned American hero” for constantly working late; Elise laughs in his face, and she makes him laugh too. Even stronger is the one where Dr. Singh entertains theological questions from his suddenly God and afterlife obsessed young patient: over the years, he tells Ryan, the doctor has come to believe that “all religions are some version of ‘what goes around comes around.’”
More or less true. And yet like too many exchanges in “A Family Man,” it too often also makes all of its other stories seem like extensions of Dane’s struggle, and privileges its hero’s moral growth above all other tales it tells. Is God punishing Dane for arrogance by making his son sick? When he searches for a cure or better treatment for the boy, when he just tries to alleviate the kid’s pain or when he bends over backwards to help a 59-year old hard to place job seeker (Alfred Molina, good as ever), is he doing penance?
If so, does that mean if either or both this story or other stories connected to Dane ends happily that means God/Fates/universe rewarding Dane for being a better person? If Dane’s son dies (or doesn’t get that job), if his wife divorces him should we assume he deserves whatever misery befalls him because of how much time he spent at the office?
These are not questions the movie seems particularly interested in exploring; perhaps it is best that way.
This type of self-analyzing thinking usually guides films to ambiguity and open ended storytelling, to paradox and intricacy; sometimes it makes the audience irritated. None of these things would appear to be within the wheelhouses of the filmmakers, or even in their dispositions.
When the movie tries for poetry it winds up in a chain drugstore’s greeting card aisle, trying to choose between one that features a cute kid laughing in an overly Photoshopped field of sunlit daisies, one that goes for gallows humor but isn’t really funny, and a third with a quote about death and wisdom that only seems deep because it’s written in cursive.
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