Who says you can never go home again?
Clearly, not the studio execs and indie distributors who plotted this fall’s releases. Starting Friday and continuing to the holiday season, more than 20 films will put their focus on the family.
Often when Hollywood pursues a trend, it’s to the detriment of filmgoers. It’s glut, rut or both. So such an energetic return to hearth and home, moms and pops, might suggest a bottom line-inspired recoil from the world’s rough challenges. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time cinema used the American family as a barricade erected to protect our fantasies of security and fidelity.
But many of the films in this bumper crop don’t signal retreat, but a willful engagement. And not a limited one – but an opening-wide one.
Major studio releases, such as “Walk the Line,” “The Weather Man” and “North Country,” tell their big-screen stories without skirting the big-ticket issues. There are very few hermetically sealed households.
Take “North Country” (Oct. 14). Niki Caro’s follow-up to “Whale Rider” stars Charlize Theron as Josey Aimes, a mother of two, struggling to get a foothold in even the working class. Glory, her friend and a union rep for a Minnesota mine, suggests that Josey apply for a job. Based on the story of a groundbreaking class-action suit, the movie’s depiction of Josey’s struggles with a sexist workplace meshes emotionally with her battles with her long disapproving father. The film’s points may not always be seamless, but they ring powerful and true.
Known for their edge, the indies don’t cede much psychological territory to the majors with impressive films like “Thumbsucker” (Sept. 30), “Bee Season” (Nov. 4), “Everything Is Illuminated” (Oct. 7) “The Dying Gaul.” (Nov. 11)
Part of the pleasure and power of this trend can be found in the variety of genres and approaches filmmakers are using to take on family matters.
Of the four major releases opening Friday, each revolves around family ties. Yet not a one is like the other. “Flightplan” couldn’t be more different from “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.” A scientist could explain the physics of roller-skating depicted in Malcolm D. Lee’s “Roll Bounce,” a tribute to ’70s rink culture and fathers and sons. But that’s about the only overlap “Roll Bounce” has with “Proof,” starring Gwyneth Paltrow as the daughter of a once great mathematician felled by dementia.
Few fall films – comedies, dramas, stop-action animation – shy away from issues vexing and perplexing us: grief (“Elizabethtown”), mental illness (“In Her Shoes”), infidelity (“Walk the Line”), profound family loyalty (again “Walk the Line”), class woes (“North Country”), divorce (“The Squid and the Whale”), cultural identity (“Bee Season,” “Everything Is Illuminated” and “The Thing About My Folks”). And in the case of Hany Abu-Assad’s powerful “Paradise Now” (Nov. 11), the family of a suicide bomber is part of the controversial and compelling picture.
In the thriller “Flightplan” (opening Friday), Jodie Foster plays a mother returning home to the U.S. with her young daughter and the casket of her husband who died in an accident. On the jet, her daughter goes missing. Only, how can she be lost at 37,000 feet? Was she ever really there?
Like a number of studio films, “Flightplan” teases darker themes while making good on their genre rules. Questions of grief, suspicion and security are posed as Foster’s character, Kyle Pratt, becomes unhinged (or is that determined?).
“Psychology and family are two of the ways actors work out stuff and evolve” said Foster, during a press junket in Toronto, about what attracted her to the role.
“I know I’m drawn to movies about moms and their children,” said the mother of two young boys. “And I know it’s a kind of primal thing, about them being this weird extension of you and not.”
Kyle’s anxiety is parental, but it’s also post 9/11. She stays calm, then unravels. She questions her sanity, then the motives of all the passengers and crew. She even accuses a Middle Eastern passenger of abducting her daughter.
The desperation Kyle Pratt succumbs to would be familiar to Tom Stall, the lead character in David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence,” one of the year’s brutally best films.
“All people are capable of feeling just about anything,” said the movie’s star, Viggo Mortensen, on the phone from New York. “And if you can feel it emotionally you can act on it, whether it’s violence, affection or loyalty.”
In “A History of Violence,” all three states get their due in astonishing, visceral, even humorous ways (this is Cronenberg, after all).
Loving husband, father of a son and a daughter and proprietor of a small-town Indiana diner, Stall becomes a hero when he stops two particulary vicious stick-up men from committing carnage. When his tale of heroism gets the TV news treatment, a mobster (Ed Harris) from Philly comes looking for Tom, insisting that he isn’t who he says he is. Maria Bello plays Tom’s wife, a lawyer.
One might think three or more furlongs would separate Cronenberg’s rugged gem and John Gatin’s “Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story,” one of the best paced G-rated live-action films to gallop around the bend in a long time.
Yet they are two of the finest films coming to theaters in the next two months. And they both embrace family.
Sitting in a suite at Toronto’s Four Seasons, star Dakota Fanning had her own ideas of why a flick about a Kentucky horse family down on its luck, a nearly crippled thoroughbred and the Breeder’s Cup race could attract audiences.
“I think this is a family movie that even though kids will really enjoy it, adults will too,” replied Fanning when asked the very adult question of why family movies are so important now. “Kurt (Russell) calls it an adult family movie. So it’s for everyone who will really like it as much as their kids do, and it’s something that all ages can get a really great message out of. I think it’s a fun movie, and there aren’t a lot of fun movies for everyone out there.”
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-820-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
