Thursday Movie Picks: All in the Family Edition - Father-Son Relationships

Written for the weekly blogathon hosted by the magnanimous Wandering Through the Shelves. Visit her blog, look at the weekly topic, and post three picks of your own!

The topic for February's "All in the Family Edition" of Thursday Movie Picks is Father & Son Relationships. Apparently, this is not something of huge interest to me, because thinking about films I've seen, I noticed a lot of Mother-Son films, a lot of Father-Daughter films, some Mother-Daughter films, but not a whole lot of Father-Son films. However, all three of my picks this week are films that I truly, madly, deeply love.

Beginners (Mike Mills, 2010) Christopher Plummer finally won his Oscar for his performance in this lovely film, the most emotional one on this list (and thus the most difficult for me to write about). If only Ewan McGregor, Mélanie Laurent, and writer-director Mike Mills's screenplay had been able to ride his coattails. As an older man coming to terms with his homosexuality - and his terminal cancer - Plummer is wonderful. The film is a delicate balancing act, ably anchored by McGregor's deeply felt performance as Plummer's son. Their relationship is complicated, but you can always see the love between them, even as McGregor's Oliver has difficulty reconciling the out and proud gay man his father has become with the man he knew.

Frequency (Gregory Hoblit, 2000) I will admit that my love for this movie mostly has something to do with how unbelievably hot Dennis Quaid looks in a leather jacket (HELLO, DADDY!), but it's just a pretty great movie overall. Jim Caviezel is great too, as a policeman who is able, via a HAM radio used during an atmospheric disturbance, to communicate with his (now-dead) firefighter dad (Quaid) 30 years in the past. After giving his father a piece of information that saves his life in the burning building that was supposed to kill him, Jim learns that messing around with time like that can lead to unexpected consequences - in this case, the murder of his mother. Then father and son work together to try and stop her killer. This is one of those films, like Field of Dreams and Brian's Song before it, that will usually reduce grown men to tears, and it earns them.

Billy Elliot (Stephen Daldry, 2000) I can't imagine what it must have been like to be a family in Britain's mining areas during the Thatcher era, but Stephen Daldry's film offers a pretty good glimpse. Gary Lewis gives a great performance as Billy's Dad, slowly realizing that his kid may actually have the chance to escape his own fate and achieve greatness, even if he doesn't understand why it had to be as a bloody ballerina as opposed to a boxer. (The relationship between Billy and his Dad is almost the exact opposite of Oliver and Hal in Beginners, except no one's actually gay.) The final scene, where he finally watches Billy perform, takes my breath away each time.

BONUS PICKS

While these two films do shine a light on father-son relationships, they are really more focused on the father's relationship with the family as a whole, so I didn't feel comfortable making them my picks this week. But with this year's Oscars so fresh in my mind, so are major contributors to these two films. Plus, it's my blog, so I'll do what I want.

The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001) I'm shocked that Wes Anderson is still Oscar-less after creating some of the most aesthetically rich films and characters of the past twenty years. Of those great characters, Royal Tenenbaum stands tall. A truly awful, deeply selfish man who realizes too late in life that he won't be remembered fondly when he dies, Royal is a mess of contradictions, and Gene Hackman plays him brilliantly, and brings the best out of his screen sons, Ben Stiller and Luke Wilson. This set the template for every Wes Anderson film that's followed, and I will admit that when I first saw this in theaters, it did absolutely nothing for me. But something about it stuck with me, and revisiting it in a film studies class in college caused it to become an all-time favorite. The ensemble is brilliant, and the music, cinematography, editing, and production design all work in concert to create a clear authorial voice, which is tricky given something this tonally complex. It's bravura filmmaking at its most understated.

The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011) I get that people don't like this one. I get that Malick can get a little bit too caught up in navel-gazing, especially here. And frankly, I did check my watch a couple of times when watching this. But... goddamn is this fucker gorgeous. Emmanuel Lubezki is a fucking genius, and it was extra sweet hearing Jessica Chastain call out "Chivoooooooooo!" when she presented the Best Cinematography Oscar this past weekend, since he really should have won his first Oscar for the flat-out miraculous work he produced here. The Tree of Life also contains what is probably Brad Pitt's best-ever performance, as a strict Texan Dad. His scenes with sons Hunter McCraken and Tye Sheridan crackle with an authenticity rarely felt in his previous work, which speaks to Malick's unique process.