Famous dads on growing kids
Will Smith likens it to being a master gardener, while Jimmy Kimmel calls it ‘‘a grow-your-own friends programme’’. The pair’s comments come as part of an octet of celebrity fathers discussing parenthood in the charming new documentary Dads (now streaming on Apple TV+).
Created by Jurassic World star, one-time face of Tourism New Zealand and actor-turned-producer-and-director, Bryce Dallas Howard, it aims to lift the lid on contemporary fatherhood.
As comedian Kenan Thompson says, much has changed in the past couple of generations, as dads have gone from ‘‘providing and being there just for holidays and discipline, to being a part of everything – and if you’re not, you’re a dork’’.
As well as getting the Hollywood papas to share their hopes, fears, proudest moments, and war stories, it also includes vignettes of disparate, less well-to-do dads on the frontlines of house husbandry. There are tales from the United States, Japan and Brazil of how children have changed their lives and sharing their fatherhood experiences have made them better men.
Howard – the daughter of Happy Days actor turned A Beautiful Mind director, Ron Howard – links these heartwarming and funny tales with the light-grilling of her celebrity pals and an abundance of social media ‘‘reaction’’ videos.
The latter is clearly an attempt for authenticity and down-to-earthness, but their presence feels jarring.
It mildly detracts from an otherwise funny and fascinating film. We learn how Ron Howard made his children watch their own extensive and elaborate birth videos (which included a camera ‘‘two feet from the exit’’), and hear Judd Apatow describe how some of the best moments of his life have been spent waiting for his kids to poop.
You’ll learn that kids don’t care ‘‘who the [US] President is, but rather that you pay attention to them’’, and find yourself ruminating on Will Smith’s lament that he had ‘‘a 1000-page manual for a picture-in-picture TV and, yet, we were sent home with a baby – with nothing’’.
More cultural observations are at the heart of Netflix’s Spelling the Dream.
Like the much-loved, similarly themed 2003 documentary Spellbound, it focuses on a group of students aiming for glory at the annual Scripps Spelling Bee (a 95-year-old event, sadly abandoned in 2020 for the first time since 1945, due to Covid-19). However, this quartet’s stories form just part of director Sam Rega’s wider thesis, which is to explain how kids from South Asian backgrounds came to dominate the competition. (Rega’s previous works have focused on elite provideo gamers and the death of Miami City commissioner Arthur Teele Jr).
In 1983, there were just six out of around 130 participants with one or both parents originally from that region of the world. Since then, 26 of the last 31 Bees have been won by ‘‘Indian-Americans’’, including the last 12 in a row. Things culminated last year, when seven of the eight students ‘‘who exhausted the dictionary’’ and couldn’t be separated, shared that heritage.
Having set the scene via that incredible and perhaps troubling night that seemed to potentially spell the competition’s end in its current format, Rega’s film somewhat disappointingly revolves around footage from the lead-up to the 2017 edition.
While interviews from former champs, prominent South Asian Americans and even the Bee’s beloved Jacques Bailly offer a fascinating insight into why this community has embraced and excelled at the event, it feels somewhat strange focusing on footage from three years ago, given what has happened since.
In the end, preconceptions are shattered and confirmed. The kids mostly seem to live ordinary lives, but you’ll be amazed – and maybe horrified – at the 100,000 word-strong Excel spreadsheet, put together by one family for ‘‘study purposes’’.
And, most importantly, you’ll learn how to spell auslaut, erysipelas and pendeloque – even if you have no idea what they mean.