“He Got Game” (1998)
Spike Lee’s 1998 “He’s Got Game,” perhaps his most personal and least political film since his 1986 debut “She’s Gotta Have It,” starred Denzel Washington and NBA pro Ray Allen as a semi-estranged father and son. The film’s core — the father-son melodrama, which sees the jailbound Jake Shuttlesworth paroled for a week to persuade his son Jesus (Allen) to sign with Big State College, the governor’s alma mater — might have been just another syrupy melodrama were it not for the quality of Denzel Washington’s performance. On paper, it’s a role with the potential to draw out the typical Washington persona: anger-driven, bombastic and sentimental. But Washington wisely chooses to underplay Shuttlesworth and it becomes one of his most muted performances, every bit as magnetic as his shoutier, shootier work. The father/son pairing make a believable duo, not least for a performance of real intelligence from Allen, a high point in the not especially well-regarded area of pro-basketball acting. It’s not a film without its issues, especially with length and resolution (persistent problems in the Lee oeuvre), but it remains nonetheless an excellent and entertaining piece of social and sporting melodrama and a strong entry in the peripatetic director’s back catalogue.
“Hud” (1963)
An altogether more full-bodied and American take on generational conflict than the kind you got from, say, Ozu, “Hud” can be a bit overlooked these days; director Martin Ritt doesn’t get to be the subject of retrospective seasons or tribute from other filmmakers, and its brand of Texan melodrama is somewhat out of fashion. But, while it’s no “Floating Weeds,” “Hud” (based on a novel by “Brokeback Mountain” screenwriter Larry McMurtry) is a potent and fascinating character study. Paul Newman, in one of his greatest performances, stars as the title character, a deeply selfish boozy womanizer, still living at home on a ranch with his father Homer (Melvyn Douglas) after his elder brother died in a car accident he may have been responsible for. The ranch is in trouble after a herd of cattle arrive with foot-and-mouth disease, and the father and son end up in a battle for the soul of Hud’s nephew Lonnie (Brandon De Wilde). It’s a positively poisonous relationship, and both the veteran Douglas and Newman — swaggering like James Dean, sexier and more unpleasant than you’d believe capable from him — tear into the material, and each other. The film is, frankly, a little dull in places, but it’s worth a watch not just for the performances of Douglas and Newman (whose final moments are among his best-ever bits of acting), but for Patricia Neal as housekeeper Alma, who won a Best Actress Oscar for her trouble (Douglas also won, while Newman had to settle for with a nomination).
“Hobson’s Choice” (1954)
Compared to some of his earlier black-and-white classics like “Brief Encounter” or “Oliver Twist,” or the epics that he would make in the years that followed like “The Bridge Over The River Kwai” and “Lawrence Of Arabia,” David Lean’s Golden Bear-winning “Hobson’s Choice” is rather overlooked these days, but it shouldn’t be. This adaptation of Harold Brighouse’s 1916 stage play stars the mighty Charles Laughton as a bullying, bluff, drunken Salford bootmaker and widower whose three daughters Maggie, Alice and Vicky (Brenda De Banzie, Daphne Anderson and future “Fawlty Towers” star Prunella Scales) are desperate to be married and get out of his control. When Hobson relents and lets the younger two get married, Maggie persuades Hobson’s apprentice Willie (John Mills) to propose to her and set up a rival shop. Lean successfully opens the play up for the most part with a strong use of real Manchester locations, and deploys a perfect cast (De Banzie and Mills are particularly superb, and Laughton gives one of his greatest screen performances, coming across like a comic Lear) to make the film into one of his most satisfying works. It ends up coming across as almost a British equivalent to the films Ozu was making around a similar time.
“Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade” (1989)
“Raiders Of The Lost Ark” is undoubtedly the towering peak of the Indiana Jones franchise, but the second best is easily the third, ‘The Last Crusade,’ in large part because of the father-son relationship it places at its center. The plot sees Indy (Harrison Ford) and his dad, Professor Henry Jones (Sean Connery), searching for the the Holy Grail. While falling for the same woman and fighting off Nazis, the Jones boys make their way past rats, Nazi rallies, and biblical puzzles to the grail through father-son teamwork. Ford and Connery have an incomparable dynamic as the professorial father and his adventurous son, which, along with a smart script polished by Tom Stoppard, might make it the funniest of the four. But there’s proper pathos too, especially when Henry’s life is put on the line at the film’s conclusion. Not only does the film resonate with generations of audiences, but it also holds a special place in the hearts of its actors. During the AFI Life Achievement Award ceremony for Sean Connery, Harrison Ford referred to the Scottish legend as “Dad” and compared the relationship between Indy and his father to their off-camera friendship.
“Interstellar” (2014)
We’ve made the argument before that parenthood is at the heart of Christopher Nolan’s work, and its clearest example is “Interstellar,” a giant, nearly three-hour sci-fi epic that also happens to revolve around the relationship between fathers and daughters (it even shot under the codename “Flora’s Letter,” after Nolan’s own daughter). Matthew McConaughey plays Coop, a former NASA pilot who’s asked to lead a mission through a wormhole in the hope of finding a new, inhabitable planet for humanity. But it means abandoning his children, and specifically daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy), with whom he has a somewhat tumultuous relationship perhaps because they’re so similar. Coop ends up away longer than he wanted, and Murph grows up into scientist Jessica Chastain, ever more furious at the way her father abandoned her. The film got a mixed reception on release, but as time passes, it resonates more and more as the most potent example of Nolan’s recurring obsessions: not just the nature of time, but anxieties over the ways work and duty can disrupt family, a father’s fear of disappointing his children (it’s worth noting that Michael Caine and Anne Hathaway’s characters are fathers and daughters too), and the hope that even after we die, we’ll be watching over our offspring.
