Kozak plays a sensible mother whose husband (Rick Moranis) is insanely obsessed with his theories about tapping the genius within young children; he reads Kafka at bedtime to their daughter, not yet 4, and proudly demonstrates that she can look at a group of paper dots and calculate the square root of the total (the child is only human and later eats the dots). The Hulce character is the only one not yet married, and indeed in his gambling and lying and dangerous brinksmanship, he seems to have flown entirely out of the orbit of parenthood.
Perhaps the best scene in the movie is the one between Robards and Hulce, after the old man has decided to make one more sacrifice for his no-good son, and then the son betrays the trust because what he really wants is not help, but simply the freedom to keep on losing.
Howard, Ganz and Mandel have 15 children among them, I understand, and that is easy to believe. Even such standard scenes as the annual school play, with the parents beaming proudly from the audience and the kids dropping their lines onstage, is handled here with a new spin.
There are many moments of accurate observation, as when kids of a certain age fall in love with terms for excrement, or when kids at a party refuse to have the good time that has been so expensively prepared for them.
What I enjoyed most about the movie was the way so many scenes were thought through to an additional level. Howard and his collaborators don't simply make a point, they make the point and then take another look at it from a new angle, finding a different kind of truth. There is a wonderful moment, for example, in which the old matriarch (Helen Shaw) makes a wise and pithy observation, and then goes out to get into the car. Her dialogue provides a strong exit line, and a lot of movies would have left it at that, but not "Parenthood," which adds a twist: "If she's so smart," Martin observes, looking out the window, "why is she sitting in the neighbor's car?" In a movie filled with good performances, I especially admired the work by Martin, Steenburgen, Wiest and Robards. What we are seeing in their performances, I think, is acting enriched by having lived, having actually gone through some of the doubts and long nights and second thoughts that belong to their characters. For Ron Howard, the movie is a triumph of a different sort: Having emerged from a TV sitcom ("Happy Days") determined to become a director, he paid his dues with apprentice work like "Grand Theft Auto," went on to box office and critical success with "Splash" and "Cocoon." Now he has made a wonderful film that shows him as a filmmaker mature and secure enough to find truth in comedy, and comedy in truth, even though each hides in the other so successfully.
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