A Movie Review, Sort Of

watched two movies recently that seemed to be connected in a way despite not really appearing so on the surface. In one film, a former national symphony cellist has been reduced to playing funerals in his native Czechoslovakia during the late 1980s just prior to the Velvet Revolution. He’s lived the life of a musician as he was taught it should be: unconnected to spouse or child. Instead, he makes a habit of irregular trysts with other men’s wives, but he always remains aloof. In the other, an incompetent father in a land where jaundice is at pandemic levels is more intent on drinking and watching TV than he is on paying attention to his own kids.

Both movies play on male stereotypes. The main character of Kolya, Louka, is the classic lone wolf, living the bachelor life into middle age and pursuing his impersonal life mission without regard to others. It's less of a matter of carelessness or recklessness than it is a matter of disconnection. This also plays into the gunfighter hero myth of the classic Westerns where the strong, handsome hero remains focused on his goals, and while he may win over the damsel in distress, he always rides off into the sunset alone. In The Simpsons Movie (come on, you had to have guessed this already), Homer is at the peak of his classic ineptitude, more so than he typically is in the series, and this time he actually drives Marge, the ever-forgiving housewife, to finally give up on her neglectful husband and leave him.

The movies continue on a similar thread throughout, although live action one lacks the sight gags and penis jokes of the animated one. Louka takes itself way too seriously for that. Louka, low on cash and with a mother dependent on him to keep her ancient home together agrees to a sham marriage to a Russian woman to help her get her Czech papers. Things are going fine with Louka continuing to live at the top of his tower, which is really just the loft of a high-rise apartment building with no elevator, and the Russian woman living elsewhere with her young son until she bolts for West Germany without the boy thanks to her new Czech papers. Days later, the paramedics show up with the boy at Louka's door. The child’s grandmother has had a stroke and will die in a few days. Louka, the legal stepfather, is left with a child to care for. The remainder of the movie is a surprisingly tender depiction of this man’s gradual transformation from reluctant caretaker to loving father, although much of his gruff and reserved nature remains. It lacks the cloying sappiness of some of the big Hollywood takes on similar stories and you leave the movie still feeling like a man (although an intelligent, thoughtful one) instead of an overweight, middle-aged woman with a large collection of cats for having enjoyed it.

The Simpsons Movie parallels the transcendence of man from selfish loner to selfless father, although in a much cheesier, classically Hollywood way. Homer, abandoned by his family in Alaska and drunk from the latest bender (at a bar called Eski Moes) first mushes and later walks back to Springfield to save the town he had doomed to destruction through his laziness and gluttony and to earn back the love his family. Of course he’s successful, but this being the Simpsons, he’s successful in a hilariously surreal manner.

Of course the Simpsons shouldn't be taken as the serious commentary on masculinity and nurturing that Kolya is. It was not intended to be such, but I do find it a little coincidental that I’d watch two films based on themes dealing with fatherhood during a point in my own life during which I’m working through very similar issues. I identified much more with Louka than I did Homer. My passion for beer has never led me to neglect my wife, and even though we have differing opinions about what and how much makes for sufficient and quality together time, I don’t think K even at our worst moments would claim that I even approach half of the neglectfulness of the Homeric Ideal of the Domestic Man. I’ve also never doomed a town to being destroyed by the EPA because I dumped the prodigious amount of poop from my precious pet pig into the town lake. It's true that I differ from Louka in the diversity of my sex life, but I have, however, felt that desire to live for goals that involve only me and to be the loner that Louka was. I did not want to be tied down, and I admit to being a little reluctant to take on the burden of a child. I still struggle with the shackles that fatherhood really does bring with it, especially when I’d never fully come to terms with the shackles that came with reality in the first place. Still, like Louka, I’ve gradually come to terms with the limitations brought by interpersonal bonds with other people through the very bonds that tied me down to begin with. I doubt that I’ll ever forget the restlessness, academic and geographic, that runs through me, but I think I’m happy now. I love being a father to E, even if I’m not perfect as one and he’ll keep me from some of my old goals, at least temporarily. Of course this gushing could just be because he slept through the night the past three days.

Of course, in the end, having shifted some of his focus away from self and music and toward the child, Louka ended up back where he’d always wanted to be in the first place. The photo of the national symphony that had been the only art on his wall may have now been partially obscured by a portrait of the boy, but in the end he was back in the arcing rows of the orchestra playing for audiences of living music lovers instead of smalls groups of mourners and the dead. Maybe in the end, I’ll end up with my seat in the orchestra too, even if my orchestra has transformed into something I never imagined.

And by the way, for those of you who didn’t get it, that last line is an implied metaphor. Don’t be so freaking literal.