TV REVIEW
“DADS”
Rated TV-14. On Apple TV+.
Grade: B-
Just in time for Father’s Day comes “Dads.” The non-fiction film might be described as a big, fat greeting card to filmmaker and father-in-chief Ron Howard (“Apollo 13”) from his daughter, the actor Bryce Dallas Howard of “The Help” and those “Jurassic Park” reboots. She also directed “Dads.”
In addition to Howard pere, who is photographed standing in front of the camera of Howard fille and being prompted by her to complete the sentence “A father is …,” are several other fathers. Many of these are celebrities such as Jimmy Kimmel, who discusses the health challenges faced by his infant son, and Will Smith, who cannot help being a movie star and whose tough West Philly childhood stands in sharp contrast to the lives of his children, who are celebrities by birth.
What would a film about celebrity dads be like if it didn’t have Judd Apatow, whose new coming-of-age film “The King of Staten Island” just opened. The film tries to capture this moment in contemporary fatherhood, and what Howard surmises is that today’s father is more involved than the fathers of the past, although this is both a fact of life in the pandemic and arguably a misleading generalization.
It is not, for example, true of the Howard paterfamilias, the writer, director and actor Rance Howard, who appears in the film, although he died in 2017. Rance was on the set every day of “The Andy Griffith Show” caring for his 5-year-old son Ron, who played Griffith’s son Opie on the show. It was Rance who objected to Opie’s smart-alecky dialogue and suggested to the producers that Opie and his dad should have more of a serious and complex father-son relationship. Rance won the showrunners over, and for a generation Griffith’s small-town sheriff was an exemplar of fatherhood.
Not all the dads are celebrities. One African-American father agreed to give up his sales job and become a stay-at-home dad and eventually a successful daddy vlogger. It is this father who rhapsodizes in one sequence about omnipresence of poop in the life of a dad with infant children (Poop in the hair, poop in the chair, poop on the floor, more poop and more). Kids and poop jokes, can it get any better?
In addition to ubiquitous poop, “Dads” risks an extinction-event level of clichés. Jimmy Fallon seems on the verge of tears just thinking about being a dad. Ditto for Kenan Thompson. Ken Jeong, who is also a physician, tells us that his and his wife’s kids were all born prematurely. Only once do we hear of an abusive father. Neil Patrick Harris jokes about trying to get his gay partner pregnant. We meet Reed Howard, who is Bryce Dallas’s brother and who tries to put baby furniture together without reading the directions.
Director Howard wants her subjects to discuss “the first time you held your baby.” She’s going for the daddy jugular. A father in Tokyo is elated that his wife finally agreed to have a baby. He gave up the job he hated to care for their son, while she provides the salary. To indicate that he does not have a conventional job, this father has bleached his hair blonde.
In one scene, one of the vlogger’s kids peers into his daddy’s eyes and says, “Wipe my butt.” Really, can it get any better?
(“Dads” contains a sea of poop and brief images from the Howards’ “birthing videos.”)
"film" - Google News
June 19, 2020 at 04:51PM
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‘Dads’ a Fathers Day card caught on film - Boston Herald
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