Daddy Day Care (2003)

Two marketing executives lose their jobs and their dignity in the same afternoon, and the film's response is to open a daycare in a suburban living room. Daddy Day Care regards this as the natural next step in the American career arc. The food company that cuts Charlie and Phil loose does so with the chilly efficiency of a spreadsheet, and the villainous Chapman Academy charges tuition that would make a private university blush. The film's sympathies sit squarely with the affordable option, the scrappy home operation, the small business run out of a kitchen. This is populism of the gentlest sort, delivered without a raised voice.

The premise inverts a few household roles and extracts a mild chuckle from the reversal. Kim returns to the office as a lawyer while Charlie learns to wrangle toddlers, and the film never pushes the observation any further than that. The cast is thoroughly multiracial and the film says nothing about it, which we may read as admirable restraint or as an absence of ambition. Regina King runs the enterprise with competence and no ceremony. Marvin, the nerdy colleague, is played for awkwardness and nothing else. The film exhibits no interest in diagnosis, identity, or the planet.

Then comes the closing speech, in which Charlie stands before a room of assembled parents and explains, at some length, that children matter more than salaries. The film means it. The film is sweet about it. The film also takes care not to linger there. A critic once compared the experience to ninety minutes in a pre-K classroom, and the comparison holds. The sermonizing is brief, the snob gets her comeuppance at a crosswalk, and the whole enterprise settles into a gentle, well-meaning nap.