2 NETFLIX DADS, INCARNATED BY TV FAVOURITES
The latest offerings are scarce, but they deliver the goods and substantial pleasure By Glenn Kenny
Two new Netflix Original films offer family dysfunction enacted by veteran television performers. Father of the Year, starring David Spade,the SNL and Just Shoot Me alum, had its premiere on July 20, while Like Father, which debuted Aug 3, features Kristen Bell, once the well-loved teenage detective of Veronica Mars as the estranged daughter of Kelsey Grammer, who should need no introduction.
Like Father is the stronger of the two. Directed by Lauren Miller Rogen, it is a predictable comedy of reconciliation. But it boasts substantial pleasures, largely on account of the performers.
Bell’s Rachel is a workaholic advertising exec who is still setting up meetings on her cellphone on the day of her wedding, at Central Park’s scenic Bethesda Fountain. Rachel’s husband-to-be cannot take it any more, and he cracks up and leaves her at the altar. Observing all this, flowers in hand, is Harry (Grammer), an uninvited guest. He is Rachel’s father, who abandoned his family when she was five, the better to pursue, you will never guess, his career.
Rachel is at first indignant on meeting the father she never really knew, but he persuades her to go out for drinks with him. Drinks, not talk, she insists — and so the two wind up drinking quite a bit. The next day, they are sharing a suite on a cruise ship — the one Rachel’s husband-to-be had booked for their honeymoon. They resolve to leave the ship at its first port of call and fly home, though you know that is not going to happen.
There is no small amusement value in the comic hook Rogen works for all its worth in a few subsequent scenes, which has Rachel and Harry being mistaken for newlyweds by many of their fellow passengers. An ensuing onboard “game show,” a sort of Newlywed
Game- style competition, is a great set piece; Harry concocts a scheme that allows them to win, albeit awkwardly. The funny stuff sells itself, and it expands with the introduction of Jeff, played by Seth Rogen, a single on the cruise whose interest in Rachel brings out Harry’s protective side. (The director is married to Seth Rogen, whose character is given the in-joke trait of never having smoked marijuana in his life.)
The movie hews to conventional structure to a fault, right down to the characters’ inevitable reconciliation. But Lauren Miller Rogen has a lot of good sense as a director, making the most of the floating-amusement-park atmosphere of cruise ships. Because Grammer is a first-rate actor who, since his distinguished stint on the sitcom Frasier has not had many meaty screen roles come his way, he really sinks his teeth into Harry, and Bell
is no slouch playing against him. They make the movie.
Father of the Year opens with unpretty views of a trailer park and a grungy, longhaired David Spade slinking about. But hold your horses, my friends; this is not the longawaited sequel to 2001’s immortal comedy
Joe Dirt, which also headlined Spade as a longhaired grunge type.
Instead, this film, directed by Tyler Spindel, splits the difference between post-teenage romantic comedy and lower-versus-middleclass-war farce. Ben (Joey Bragg), a recent college graduate, visits his hometown on his way to New York, dropping in on his dad, an aggressive loser named Wayne, played by Spade. Ben’s best friend, Larry (Matt Shively), has problems of his own at home, including a pushy science-nerd stepfather, Mardy (Nat Faxon). Rivalries between the households, such as they are, lead to Wayne’s challenging Mardy to a fight.
All this has just about as much narrative import and urgency as you might imagine, as well as a lot of third-tier Farrell y-brothersinfluenced gross-out humour. There is a scene at the beginning in which Spade’s character skinny-dips in a kiddie pool cobbled together in the back of a pickup truck. This goes bad when the truck’s owner gets in and starts driving. I admit, I laughed. I was also charmed by Bridgit Mendler as Meredith, Ben’s feisty hometown love interest. As for the rest, it is a typical production from Adam Sandler’s outfit, Happy Madison, easygoing, vulgar and reliant on its audience’s good will toward its lead performer.
Watching it compelled me to finally get around to The Week Of, the wedding comedy starring Sandler and Chris Rock that debuted on Netflix back in April.
That picture had a “the day of” review embargo, so I assumed it had to be pretty bad, and the reviews seemed to bear me out. Still, as someone who occasionally enjoys Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, the abrasive character created by Robert Smigel, who wrote and directed The Week Of I was still curious. How bad could it be?
Well, as the popular Mad Men meme goes, it’s “Not great, Bob!” This story of Sandler’s financially insecure Long Island common man putting on a brave face before the affluent father of the groom (Rock) is a familiar one. They say that familiarity breeds contempt, but in this case, it does not do a lot more than elicit weariness.
The movie’s tone does have at least a consistent tinge of Smigel’s acerbic perspective — an early scene shows a couple of kids watching the classic film The Grapes of
Wrath on TV with the sound off while their off-screen parents scream at each other. The
Week Of has a sharp running joke about the casual racism of the white family here and its inability to remember the names of any of the groom’s relatives.
Sandler’s characterisation of a working stiff with too much pride, while not as complex as his performance in Noah Baumbach’s The
Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), also on Netflix, does not entirely lack in verisimilitude. Sandler clearly knows this type, and can play it credibly.
While the movie is ultimately more of the same old same old, it is at least not as appallingly sexist and culturally insensitive as The
Ridiculous Six, Sandler’s dreaded 2015 Netflix Original Western “spoof.”