Dad Jokes: POWER BALLAD and THE BREADWINNER

Sometimes you just want to go to the movies and see a light story about plausible people in slightly implausible scenarios adjacent to real life. Like if your life had a sprinkling of movie magic over it, you might stumble into something like this, too. That’s something that Irish writer-director John Carney seems to understand well when he gets the formula exactly right in building his light dramas that are lifted to something closer to transcendence through the power of music. It was there in his intimate, casual street-busker romance from 2006, Once, and in his 80s coming-of-age garage band musical from 2016, Sing Street. And it’s there again in his latest: Power Ballad. (I guess he gets it right exactly once every ten years.) It stars Paul Rudd as an expat American singer-songwriter working as the front man to a wedding band. He gave up his dreams of stardom to settle down in a Dublin suburb with an Irish wife and daughter. But he never stopped writing. This is the part that is definitely believable. 

The slight fantasy of the movie is that his band gets a gig at the reception for the childhood best friend of a former boy band member. Wouldn’t you know it that the fading celeb (played by an aptly cast Nick Jonas) is planning a comeback and is in town to write his new album? He shows up at the wedding, jams with the band, and connects with Rudd. They have fun buddy chemistry as they share some works in progress with each other and part ways feeling good about meeting a simpatico artist. Six months later, Rudd hears one of his songs over the speakers at the local mall. The star stole his song. Carney explores the ramifications with a degree of generosity to both men, and watches as the one’s anger and the other’s guilt keep them apart. But the movie’s light tone and strain of good humor—not to mention the great original songs—make some kind of happy ending inevitable. That might keep the movie’s scope, and emotional range, small, but there’s something so deeply satisfying about watching a well-oiled sentimental script go through its paces with likable leads and catchy tunes. It’s the John Carney special. 

Even lighter and less substantial is The Breadwinner. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t satisfy in its own way. Starring and co-written by standup comedian Nate Bargatze, it’s a down-the-middle sitcom of the sort that comics of his observational, family friendly kind would do all the time in the 80s and 90s on TV and the big screen. As such, it has a throwback, even retrograde, premise. He’s a husband, a father, and a well-meaning oaf. His wife (Mandy Moore) has a great business opportunity, care of a sequence in which the Shark Tank judges play themselves. (I'd say part of the fantasy here is that her invention would even get a deal.) Now she has to leave for two weeks to launch her product, which means he needs to be the sole parent to their three adorable daughters. Hijinks ensue. If you’re already imagining burnt toast, laundry shenanigans, and driving the wrong way to school, you have the right idea. It might seem a little unusual to imagine a dad so far out of the loop these days. But this isn’t a movie about all dads; it’s a movie about this dad. And Bargatze makes a believably unaware guy. His standup works because of its low-key befuddlement, like an affable guy who’s slowly learning about how to process his own life. Though obviously his observational style relies on some intelligent comprehension, he knows how to approach everyday problems with an unassuming gee-didja-notice? attitude. He has the right slightly stunned look to sell the well-meaning confusion. 

He brings to the movie that sense of middle class bewilderment, and a gooey sentimentality about the love of family that draws a guy out of his bubble of privilege and into fuller responsibility. It helps that the kids are so cute, and the jokes are actually pretty funny—bolstered by a supporting cast including Will Forte, Colin Jost, Kate Berlant, Zach Cherry, Kumail Nanjiani. It has all the charms of the throwbacks it’s copying, with a little Everybody Loves Raymond here, a little Home Improvement there. But it has mercifully none of the gender anxiety the premise might provoke. He genuinely doesn’t mind that his wife has to be the main breadwinner and wants to help her. He’s just not used to doing without the valuable co-parenting work she’s been providing. It feels, if not exactly true to life, true to some lives. Like the Adam Sandler movies of twenty years ago, it’s cleanly shot, stuffed with silly asides, and loaded up with product placement. (Thanks, Toyota, KFC, and Walmart, I guess.) It's not vulgar or crass, just sweet and gentle. We don’t get live action comedies in theaters much, and certainly not family friendly ones. It’s nice to remember what it’s like to be in room of people chuckling along with one that gets the job done. 

Cruel and Usual: GOAT

Here comes Goat to give us the disgusting flip side of Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!! That was a nostalgia-soaked film about the upsides of sunny homosocial bonding and collegiate identity formation. Goat is the grimier underbelly, concerned mostly with a fraternity’s Hell Week hazing, showing in extended, unblinking, and repellent detail the extent to which these ritualized houses of horrors cater to every worst impulse a young man might have. Pledges are humiliated, stripped, attacked, pelted with garbage, caged, beaten, and made to imbibe as much alcohol as possible. And that’s only the first night. They’ll be put through a gauntlet of torture, beaten down emotionally and physically night after night. And for what? To say they belong to a fraternity? To gain access to the sociological benefits that come from such intense relationship forming coupled with a direct historical lineage for this brotherhood? One side character is affronted when his roommate suggests quitting mid-rush. “If the frat goes away, everything goes,” he says.

The lead character is a nice enough young man (Ben Schnetzer) who, in the summer before his freshman year in college, is assaulted. His attackers jump him outside an off-campus party where he was visiting his older brother (Nick Jonas). Bloodied and bruised, he’s clearly still suffering from post-traumatic stress when the fall semester rolls around. This is clearly someone who is psychologically not ready to endure the tortures of rushing a fraternity. But his brother is in the big frat on campus, and he wants to prove to him, and himself, that he’s man enough to become one of the guys. The fragility of his mental state isn’t hammered home, but it certainly amplifies the torture on display. As if seeing the slaps and hearing the shouting, watching the nauseating slurries of food and fluids and seeing the brutal pranks (urinated on while stuck in a large dog cage; blindfolded and marched to a bathroom where a banana is floating in the toilet, made to reach in and grab it; forced to down vast quantities of beer with the threat of a being forced to defile a goat as punishment for failure) weren’t hard enough, we have subtextual knowledge that makes it even harder to take.

What is it that makes the robbery in the film’s opening something worth investigating and punishing – one frat member sneers bileful scorn at “townies” – while the hazing goes on with near total immunity? The fuzzy dichotomy between lawful and unlawful beatings set up by writer-director Andrew Neel and co-writers Mike Roberts and David Gordon Green shows plainly that frats aren’t the root of all evil, but the way they codify and condone systematized toxic masculinity isn’t healthy. It’s societal rot. These aren’t boyish antics excused as japes and capers. These aren’t charming jerks redeemed – even only partially – by their camaraderie. The frat’s leadership is presented as entirely scary, even when feigning care or talking up the good of their unity. They hide behind tradition, proud it’s been this way for a hundred years, and excusing it because what they do is no different, they say, than what other frats do. Emboldened by their perceived immunity, they enact a torturous relationship with their pledges.

It’s enough to make one wonder if frats nationwide are nothing but hundreds of replicas of the Stanford prison experiment, authority inevitably corrupting to and emboldening of every testosterone-drunk freedom of impressionable young men. When they hear another frat has ratted them out for their intense hazing, they flip out. As the movie progresses there are cracks in the frat’s façade, with one member’s slow dismay over the recruits’ extra-nasty treatment leading him to ask, “is it harder this year?” When the dean brings extra scrutiny to bear, investigating charges, they are aggrieved. How dare they face consequences? The performances are committed, wild-eyed, at a fever pitch that approaches frightening intensity. Here are lost young men, radicalized by the pure adrenaline of power, big fish in a small pond allowed to devour anyone they wish.

Neel’s filmmaking is sensitive and restrained, simply recording the specifics in long, uncomfortable, unadorned sequences. Many are harrowing. Some are merely sad, like when an alum (James Franco) storms in for a visit, expressing great disappointment a job, wife, and child are keeping him from partying like the old days. He, too, has bought into the toxicity of the structure, and can’t get it out of his system. It’s poisoned at the root. As the lead character must decide what kind of a man he wants to be, how fully he wants to buy into this cracked situation, the movie gathers a quiet moral force. We see the pain on the pledges’ faces, see it swallowed back with a forced stoicism as they allow abuse to be piled on them even when it stings, even when it hurts, even when it bleeds, even when they should know better, even when their lives could be endangered. The vomit and the blood and the bruises cake the grotesque tableaus. It’s as good a reminder as any that no good frat is good enough to excuse the existence of the worst.