\n<\/p>\n
If you went to the movies this fall, you probably met him: the Sad Art Dad. You\u2019ll have known him by his miserableness; despite the flash of the cameras and the cheers of the groundlings, he\u2019s most often found moping alone. His vocation may vary\u2014movie star (in Jay Kelly<\/em>), art-house director (Sentimental Value<\/em>), blockbuster Tudor playwright (Hamnet<\/em>)\u2014but his problem tends to be the same. He has chosen great art over good parenting, utterly failing as a father, and he knows it. There\u2019s something delicious about his cocktail of self-pity and self-loathing, which can arouse both the viewer\u2019s repulsion and compassion. It may not be much fun to be a Sad Art Dad, but it\u2019s certainly fun to watch one.<\/p>\n The distant and distracted patriarch, although abundant on-screen in 2025, is not a novel invention. Yet most movie dads are more likely to be found balancing stellar careers and model parenting (lawyer-dad in To Kill A Mockingbird<\/em>; Mob-dad in the Godfather <\/em>films) than exhibiting\u2014let alone acknowledging\u2014their fatherly flaws. Sometimes prioritizing professional ambitions is even depicted as admirable: In Interstellar<\/em>, Matthew McConaughey plays an astronaut who abandons his kids for a decades-long space mission, but only in order to save humanity<\/em>. The character might beat himself up for it, but the viewer understands that it\u2019s a pretty good excuse, as far as they go.<\/p>\n What\u2019s different about this new cinematic crop of dads is their culpability. They each choose themselves over their kids, prioritizing creative fulfillment. George Clooney\u2019s titular A-lister in Noah Baumbach\u2019s Jay Kelly<\/em> admits as much when trying to explain his years-long absence to his now-adult daughter: \u201cI wanted something very badly,\u201d he says, \u201cand I thought if I took my eye off of it, I couldn\u2019t have it.\u201d At least Jay is trying to apologize. When Gustav (played by Stellan Skarsg\u00e5rd), the ornery patriarch of Joachim Trier\u2019s Sentimental Value<\/em>, is accused by his daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve) of never having watched her perform, he defends himself by saying that he doesn\u2019t like theater. Meanwhile, in Chlo\u00e9 Zhao\u2019s Hamnet<\/em>, William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) likes the theater a bit too much. Although he\u2019s a much more affectionate parent than Jay or Gustav, the Bard\u2019s absence\u2014he gallops away from plaguey Stratford-upon-Avon to the Elizabethan West End\u2014has calamitous consequences for his kids.<\/p>\n [Read: Parenting is the least of her worries]<\/p>\n But these films are not pat condemnations of the flawed fathers they depict; they illustrate, sometimes with seeming ambivalence, the consequences of such self-absorption. Tellingly, Sentimental Value<\/em>\u2019s most tender scene doesn\u2019t feature Gustav at all. Instead, it\u2019s a quiet moment between Nora and her sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). Having finally read Gustav\u2019s latest screenplay, and found within it surprising echoes of the darkest periods of her own life, an emotional Nora sits on her bedroom floor beside her sister. The script is so uncannily accurate, Agnes notes, that it\u2019s as though their father had been there for Nora\u2019s suffering. \u201cWell, he wasn\u2019t,\u201d Nora replies. \u201cYou were.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a gorgeous demonstration of familial love that also lays bare the true cost of the Sad Art Dad\u2019s narcissism. He has made himself redundant; his children have learned, painfully, to cope without him. The same specter of redundancy haunts both Hamnet <\/em>and Jay Kelly<\/em>. When Shakespeare arrives home after tragedy strikes, he finds that he\u2019s too late to help his family. He then announces his intent to return to London\u2014and his wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), slaps him. Jay\u2019s daughter Jess (Riley Keough) tells her father with brutal candor not to worry about her: \u201cI\u2019m gonna have a good life, just not with you.\u201d A memorable shot in Sentimental Value<\/em> shows Gustav standing alone on a Normandy beach, his hulking, black-suited figure marooned against miles of sand and scudding lilac clouds. The price of failed fatherhood, it seems, is loneliness.<\/p>\n Does the Sad Art Dad regret his choices? Is making great art\u2014which, in these films, has a capacious, allegorical quality\u2014worth ruining your relationship with your kids? Each of these movies tries to convince us, with varying degrees of success, that prioritizing your artistic endeavors offers emotional compensation. Hamnet<\/em>, for instance, ends with a delicately choreographed moment of parental connection. Agnes, standing in the audience at the Globe Theatre, reaches out to grasp the hand of the young actor playing Hamlet; in the film\u2019s version of the play, the tragic boy-hero is named for her dead son. Moving though it is, the scene\u2019s mawkishness renders it unpersuasive: Agnes\u2019s abrupt pivot from bitterly resenting her husband to forgiving him strains credulity. A play, even a Shakespeare play, is no substitute for a child.<\/p>\n [Read: Two different ways of understanding fatherhood]<\/p>\n Jay Kelly<\/em> also considers the case for putting your craft before your kids, but only half-heartedly. It toys with the idea that the magic of the movies at least partially justifies Jay\u2019s parental negligence; the film ends on a long close-up of Jay\u2019s face as he watches a retrospective reel of his career, visibly moved. But the film ultimately gives up trying to convince the audience that the art was worth the human cost. In its closing line, Jay asks, fruitlessly, for a chance to live his life over again. Measured against the wreckage of his relationships, Hollywood\u2019s comforts prove chilly even to the movie star.<\/p>\n Sentimental Value<\/em>\u2019s vision of film as a doorway to empathy and repair is by far the most compelling. Gustav\u2019s script may dwindle beside the compassion his daughters offer each other, yet his transformation of Nora\u2019s pain into art is still an act of love. As Agnes says to her sister: \u201cI think he wrote it for you.\u201d Gustav\u2019s work, we realize, is more empathetic, more attentive to other people, than he is. His daughters might find this to be a bitter-tasting irony, but the consolation is real\u2014particularly for an actor like Nora, who eventually finds creative catharsis playing the part Gustav based on her.<\/p>\n Oddly, despite his inadequacies, the Sad Art Dad suggests a promising cultural shift on-screen. To pay attention to the idea of flawed fatherhood, after all, is to think seriously about what constitutes its opposite, the good dad. Laura Dern\u2019s unsentimental divorce lawyer says it well in Baumbach\u2019s Marriage Story<\/em>, which is also about depressed dads: \u201cThe idea of a good father was only invented, like, 30 years ago.\u201d As such, it\u2019s striking to find three films out at the same time that are gnawed by such similar anxieties. Perhaps Joachim Trier put it best: \u201cTenderness is the new punk.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you went to the movies this fall, you probably met him: the Sad Art Dad. You\u2019ll have known him by his miserableness; despite the flash of the cameras and the cheers of the groundlings, he\u2019s most often found moping alone. His vocation may vary\u2014movie star (in Jay Kelly), art-house director (Sentimental Value), blockbuster Tudor<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39354,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[330,5296,6805,1394,415],"class_list":{"0":"post-39353","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-dads","9":"tag-hook","10":"tag-letting","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-stop"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39353\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/39354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}