Fathers and Daughters

Russell Crowe, Amanda Seyfried, Aaron Paul, Diane Kruger and Jane Fonda flesh out Gabriele Muccino’s New York-set melodrama.
If Italian director Gabriele Muccino has managed to make four American features with major Hollywood stars, he must be doing something right. After his dreary sports rom-com Playing for Keeps, one had to wonder what it was, but Fathers & Daughters puts him back on the family-friendly, melodramatic track. Bringing good old-fashioned Mediterranean emotion to a screenplay that feels oh so familiar, this modern-day weepie unapologetically plays to the crowd rather than the critics. A notable cast featuring Russell Crowe, Amanda Seyfried, Aaron Paul, Diane Kruger and Jane Fonda should encourage matinee goers, before bedding down on the small screen.  
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Strangely, despite a pile-up of searing tragedies and rank injustices, there are fewer tears in store for viewers than in some of his previous work, which should be the sign of a maturing director. At the same time, there’s more dramatic meat to chew on, around the theme of how childhood influences one's adult life. Amanda Seyfried’s deep-diving portrayal of an emotionally short-circuited young woman springs convincingly from the intercut scenes detailing her relationship with loving dad Russell Crowe when she was eight years old. Pulling out all the stops on flashbacks and flash forwards, Muccino underlines – for those who need it – the connection between youthful traumas and adult dysfunctions. Typical of the director, a strong undercurrent of hope courses through the darkest moments of Brad Desch’s screenplay, leaving room for an easily foreseeable upbeat finale.

The film opens on the car crash that kills Katie’s mother. Dad Jake Davis (Crowe), a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, was driving and got distracted by a heated argument with his wife. He survives the accident with a severe head injury that leaves him subject to violent, epileptic-like seizures, which come on at all the wrong moments. Little Katie, played with joyful maturity by first-timer Kylie Rodgers, seems unscathed in the back seat. But when Dad surrenders to depression and has to check into a mental hospital for seven months, she is left in Westchester with her evil aunt (Kruger at her icy Teutonic best) and uncle, who are filthy rich. (“I make more money than God!” boasts the latter.) They hatch a plan to adopt Katie, on the grounds that Jake is too poor and unstable to take care of her, not to mention the unpardonable fact that his last book bombed.

With this threat hovering in the background, Jake buys Katie her first bike and enrolls her in an expensive school, writing all night to pay the bills. Just as another down-and-out dad, played by Will Smith in Muccino’s The Pursuit of Happyness, struggled to keep cruel reality from his small son, so Jake pretends nothing is wrong while smothering Katie in fatherly love. Crowe is good in the part – lovingly affectionate, bearishly physical, but also a tad witty when he comes out of his self-imposed isolation and takes a swipe at stiff-backed lawyers, educators and his brother-in-law. His warm relationship to his publisher, played to a T by a relaxed Jane Fonda, is the only positive one outside of his daughter.

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