Fathers and Daughters splits its attention between two time periods. In 1989, celebrated author Jake Davis (Russell Crowe) gets into a car accident that kills his wife and leaves him damaged. He starts having random seizures, and spends almost a year away from his only daughter Katie (Kylie Rogers) to get treatment. When he returns, his in-laws, who have been taking care of Katie while he was gone, declare their intention to adopt her. Jake objects and takes Katie away. He struggles to raise his daughter, doing everything he can to keep her fed and educated. But his illness hasn’t completely gone away, and his in-laws aren’t done with him.
The other side of this story takes place in present day, with a grown-up Katie (Amanda Seyfried) working as a social working specializing in cases of orphaned children. She is handed the case of Lucy (Quvenzhane Wallis), a young girl who refuses to talk following the loss of her parents. In her personal life, Katie has taken to having casual sex with practically every man that takes an interest. That is, until she meets Cameron (Aaron Paul), an aspiring writer that worships her father. She gives the relationship a go, but starts having trouble when old wounds resurface.
At a crucial point in the film, a character says this line: “Men can survive without love, but not us women.” And this pretty much sums up the sentiments of this film, which seems to lionize the misunderstood, thoroughly imperfect men who apparently live only for their children, and minimize the women that grow up in that environment. The film, using armchair psychology, presents us with a characters defined completely by an abstract conception of daddy issues. When the movie isn’t being simply trite, it can get downright insulting.
Clearly, the film believes itself to be something more than it is. Its look resembles that of a prestige drama, the kind of important film that aches for awards attention. The soft, golden look and the gentle score imply the sort of sensitivity and poise required of films of such profundity. But the film is the opposite of profound. Everything exists only on the surface, the characters bearing no depth beneath the polished sheen of their beautiful suffering. Take for example the illness from which Jake suffers. It is constantly described as a psychological problem, except it only ever manifests as a physical problem. It would be too much for the movie to actually make the character psychologically complex. So basically, he’s just a good man who sometimes gets shaky.
He goes up against paper villains whose motivations are hazy at best. In the present day, Katie outright says that she has casual sex because it makes her feel something, which is better than feeling nothing. It is one thing for a plot to feel contrived. In this film, every character is contrived, a collection of clichés that bear no humanity beneath them. A strong cast of actors can do nothing to make these characters feel more like human beings. Russell Crowe, Amanda Seyfried, Diane Kruger, Bruce Greenwood and Aaron Paul contribute great talent, but none of it adds up to much.
Fathers and Daughters just can’t be taken seriously. It feels like a first draft from an overeager screenwriting student who’s just read a Psych 101 textbook for the very first time. Put aside the trite plot that has its issues resolved without much effort from the protagonists, and you have a weirdly sexist work that portrays women as inherently weak creatures defined entirely by their relationships with men. Meanwhile, fathers are trying to do the best thing, because they’re men. It’s laughable.
My Rating:
