This Is My Father Review
by "Steve Rhodes" (Steve DOT Rhodes AT InternetReviews DOT com)June 6th, 1999
THIS IS MY FATHER
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 1999 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): ** 1/2
The Quinn brothers' THIS IS MY FATHER is such an obvious labor of love that it is a shame that it doesn't have more depth. Primarily set in a 1939 Ireland that seems a half-century earlier still, the film waxes nostalgic for a time that probably never was except in books and motion pictures.
Starring Aidan Quinn as Kieran O'Dea, written with studied simplicity and directed with slow deliberateness by brother Paul and filmed in warm tones by brother Declan, the movie lists all three as executive producers. As a one-hour episode on television's Masterpiece Theater, the story's limitations would not have been so obvious. But at a full two hours, the thinnest of the plot and the reliance on stereotypes can get a bit tiresome. All of this notwithstanding, the cast's heartfelt performances raise the picture above the hackneyed storyline.
The story opens in the present in Illinois. An unhappy high school teacher, Kieran Johnson (James Caan), is being ridiculed by his class. He puts his class in its place by dryly rattling off what he claims will be the most important message they will hear. He reads a set of statistics for lower middle-class youth like themselves. He says that only 2 of them will be financially stable; most of the rest will spend their lives flipping burgers and sweeping floors. And 4 of them will go to prison, one of them for the rest of his life. Afterwards, he looks more depressed than his students.
While visiting his mother, who has had a stroke and can no longer speak, he comes across a picture of her from her youth in Ireland. With her in the picture is a man who he assumes may be the father he never met. He decides to go to Ireland to find the truth about the picture and see if he can locate his father.
Once he arrives in Ireland, he meets a fortune-telling gypsy who knew his mother and tells the story of his mother and father and of the old curse on his family.
Most of the rest of the story is spent in flashback in 1939 when Kieran Johnson was conceived by his father, Kieran O'Dea (Aidan Quinn), and his mother, Fiona Flynn (Moya Farrelly). He's in his early twenties probably, but she's only 17.
Flynn is a spunky lass with a bewitching smile who charms the pants off of O'Dea. A simple farm worker, he's referred to as a "poorhouse bastard," since the tenant farmers who work the Flynn lands got O'Dea from an orphanage to be their live-in laborer.
The movie is full of incidents and plot contrivances that make little sense. The worst of these is John Cusack's cameo as Life magazine photographer Eddie Sharp. As Flynn and O'Dea walk along a remote beach, Sharp lands the plane that he is piloting. Sharp explains that he has a desperate need to pass around a football in order to relax. After he takes the obligatory photo to tie the past with the present, he's gone again.
In another such disingenuous moment, Stephen Rea shows up as a fire-and-brimstone priest who, in the confines of the confessional, demands to hear all of the lurid details of O'Dea's sexual sins. Not content to learn of what O'Dea did, the priest, wanting more titillation, insists on knowing everything the sinner would like to do as well.
Our full audience had one woman who laughed regularly and another who snored loudly, while the rest sat there in almost total silence. Slightly humorous and a little poignant, this small movie tells a simple story without many flourishes. Still, the grace and earnestness of the performances give the relentlessly corny film a soul that makes it more than the sum of its cliched characters.
THIS IS MY FATHER runs 2:00. It is rated R for a little profanity and a brief sex scene and would be fine for teenagers.
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