A Pulitzer-winning author struggles to raise his young cutsey-pie daughter alone. It’s complicated: the author, named Jake Davis, is embodied by a fiercely intense Russell Crowe. Jake’s wife died in a car-crash with Jake at the wheel; they were having a squabble about his previous infidelities at the time, with their daughter Katie, watching from the backseat. Jake’s millionaire in-laws hold him accountable and would like to adopt their niece. Jake resists but the accident that killed his spouse has left him suffering from debilitating seizures.
The ensuring (and pretty implausible) custody battle – dating back to 1989 – crosscuts with a contemporary narrative. Katie has grown up to be Amanda Seyfried, a promiscuous psychology graduate. Can case work involving a damaged young girl (Quvenzhané Wallis) and the love of a decent chap (Aaron Paul) heal Katie’s emotional scars?
Nobody does maudlin drama quite like the Italian director Gabriele Muccino, whose best known works – the Will Smith vehicles The Pursuit of Happyness and Seven Pounds – are punctuated with actors staring into mirrors or looking gloomily off into the distance. In this spirit, Russell Crowe gets to do plenty of convincing seizure acting, Seyfried gets to tear up a lot, and an entire constellation of stars – Fonda, Greenwood, Kruger – turn on all of the feels all the time.
The film is based on the 2012 Black List script (the list purporting to contain Hollywood's Best Unproduced Screenplays) by Brad Desch. The Black List has yielded plenty of hits – Whiplash, The King's Speech, Argo – and plenty of misses like Sex Tape.
Fathers and Daughters feels like a mid-table entry: it's this year's The Beaver. There's something too old-fashioned and wilfully anachronistic about the entire enterprise. The film's clutter of characters translates into a lot of shorthand and stereotypes: Diane Kruger is a mean drunk as the constant clink of ice-cubes in her glass indicate, and so on.
No matter, as big, gloopy melodramas go, this is a perfectly good time-passer with lashings of actors and acting.
