The Sins of the Father
A cinematic canon of cosmically-fated children
“The Lord passed by before [Moses], and proclaimed, “The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.”
-Exodus 34:6-7
In an age littered with therapy-speak, “daddy issues” have become something of a catch-all ailment for characters in fiction. Maybe it’s my luck of having one who didn’t mess me up in seemingly irreparable ways, but I find that it’s become something of a lazy shorthand to elide details for the past. Just say a father has messed someone up, and the audience apparently should just know some level of psychological trauma exists.
I do think this helps explain why Succession touched such a nerve — it took time to show the how of lingering paternal anxieties so that the what ended up feeling perfunctory.
I’ve been thinking for a while about a series of movies that I’ve dubbed “the sins of the father” canon. These films fly in the face of the idea that individual initiative is enough to outrun the legacy of one’s father. In these films, an emotional inheritance seems encoded in the characters’ bloodstream. Choices cannot overpower the curse of their birth. These intimate dramas raise one of the most provocative questions of human existence: are our choices ever really our own?
Notably, this list does NOT include any works by Martin Scorsese, a director who deals with fathers who are entirely absent — unlike these films where the father is far too present. For me, “the sins of the father” movies must be multigenerational tales so we can see both the fortune and fate of a character’s biological origins.
A programmer’s note: I’ve arranged these as paired couplets, though you’ll need to wait and see how the first film connects with the last.
The ur-text of cinematic “sins of the father” film is undeniably and irrefutably Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (available to rent from various digital providers). “What is it with men and The Godfather?” asks Meg Ryan’s Kathleen Kelly in You’ve Got Mail? Coppola’s epochal drama maps the concept of the American Dream, which is already big enough of a beast to tackle, onto the eternal dilemma of father-son relationships.
Is it ever possible to escape the shadow of your past? Are we all just running in circles to assume the place left behind by the previous generation? Can you ever really advance beyond what you inherit? With time, Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone learns how far rugged individualism can get you in America.
These next two films are sprawling dramas, perhaps to their own detriment. I find The Place Beyond the Pines (available for free with ads on Freeve through Amazon Prime Video) and Magnolia (available to rent from various digital providers) quite unwieldy as they chart multiple father-child stories across their extended runtimes. I think the ambitious reach of each film slightly exceeds its grasp, but I keep coming back to these films again and again hoping that maybe one day something will fully click into place.
You have to admire the ways in which Derek Cianfrance and Paul Thomas Anderson, respectively, interweave several intergenerational journeys together to show the shared struggle faced by so many. The filmmakers often amplify that tragedy by juxtaposing various visual or narrative echoes between fathers and their sons. We can see the connections. They cannot. The films unite and synthesize what the characters cannot for themselves, and it’s gutting each time.
If you need a slightly less dour lens on “the sins of the father,” rest assured, there are ways to explore this thematic territory in a more comedic fashion. One-time collaborators Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach have each taken their run at intergenerational dramedy with The Royal Tenenbaums (available to rent from various digital providers) and The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (available on Netflix), respectively.
In both droll and devastating films, a larger-than-life patriarch played by a titan of New Hollywood acting (Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman) royally messes up his children. Their Gen X spawn, often played by actors with broad comedic backgrounds (united by Ben Stiller across both films, but also including Luke Wilson and Adam Sandler), act out as grown-up stunted children when their father re-enters their orbit. It’s humorous and heavy in equal measure to watch them regress in real-time as if their neglectful father exerts a force akin to gravity.
For those inclined to look for something spiritually inclined in their father-son stories, both Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (available to rent from various digital providers) and Trey Edward Shults’ Waves (available to rent from various digital providers) point toward the tricky nature of breaking the cycles of abuse through purifying redemption. I doubt I’ll have to convince many cinephiles of the former film’s cosmic inclination, but I’ll point you to my longer review of the sprawling A24 drama to prove out the connections. (I know for a fact the director read it and found it resonant!)
While these films might feel entirely disparate in style and sensibility, at their core, both are about stern patriarchs who withhold love from their children in an attempt to steel them for the world ahead. Both films see the effort as noble in intention but ultimately misguided as it drives the children into self-defeating tendencies that drive them further away from the end goal of advancement. The rift that grows between generations ultimately needs divine intervention to heal.
What do you do when you feel like dad’s gone mad? That’s the dilemma in Jodie Foster’s intriguing curio The Beaver (available to rent from various digital providers) and Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s bleak drama The Return (available to rent from various digital providers). Both films have something of a coming-of-age frame as impressionable young men try to make sense of the world and must actively seek to avoid the influence of the figure who should be providing the most guidance.
In The Beaver, the lacking authority figure is Mel Gibson’s Walter, who needs a beaver puppet to communicate with the world after hitting rock bottom. In The Return, that’s an unnamed father who emerges from an extended absence to take his sons on a mysterious island trip that tests their readiness for manhood. While other films in this list tackle the longstanding issues that arise from letting this kind of treatment go unaddressed, this pair examines the very points of pain as they occur.
And now we circle back to what I’d pair with The Godfather — the only film listed here that I’d consider has a primarily female point of view. That work is Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks (available on Apple TV+), a film drawn from various details of her own life without being fully autobiographical. I think this is a fascinating work to come from the daughter of the man who gave us The Godfather as it examines how a daughter can pick up some of the best and worst elements of her father.
This jaunty joint follows Coppola’s avatar, Rashida Jones’ Laura, as she struggles to write her next book. Her father, Bill Murray’s philandering Felix, fills that void left by writer’s block with suspicions about her husband potentially cheating on her. Their desire to prove out the hunch becomes something of a father-daughter bonding experience, yet a fascinating third-act turn makes On the Rocks something more in the vein of “the sins of the father” than initially expected. Coppola doesn’t quite buy into the same eerie mythos of inherited behavior, though she does observe how it seems to transfer through osmosis. Especially when you consider her cinematic lineage, this becomes a fascinating message to unpack.
You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd. I’ve also compiled every movie I’ve ever recommended through this newsletter via a list on the platform as well.
Josh O’Connor — as tasteful in music selection as he is in role selection!
I really liked this piece by Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic that zoomed out to see a number of trends in art and AI as “the end of endings.” (Also a fun read from the publication Ron DeSantis hates enough that he had to mention it in his Twitter Spaces campaign launch: why movies are best before noon.)
Have to save some exciting stuff for next week because it’s been BUSY since the last publication!
Tribeca Festival is underway, and I’m on the review beat for The Playlist. So far, I’ve reviewed:
For Slant Magazine, I interviewed writer/director Georgia Oakley about her fantastic drama Blue Jean, a riveting about a closeted lesbian P.E. teacher facing down brutal legislation in Thatcherite England. More on this film later, but keep an eye out for it.
I had the misfortune of being assigned Transformers: Rise of the Beasts for review at The Playlist.
For Decider, I said stream it to the docuseries Burden of Proof (on Max) and skip it to Baby Ruby (on Hulu).
You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.
A fun conversation coming for subscribers this weekend!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall