Father Figures (2017)

Father Figures arrives with the modest ambition of making us laugh at two grown men hunting for a biological father across the eastern seaboard, and it achieves perhaps a third of that ambition. Lawrence Sher, a distinguished cinematographer stepping behind the camera, directs with the energy of a man filling out paperwork. The premise (fraternal twins, a promiscuous mother played by Glenn Close, a parade of possible sires) is a road-trip engine that sputters from Miami to Worcester without ever finding a gear. Critics were unkind. Audiences were indifferent. The film grossed less than its budget and finished ninth on its opening weekend, which is its own kind of review.

The cast is studded with minority performers: Katt Williams as a philosophizing hitchhiker, Ving Rhames as a retired football player, Retta as a wedding planner, Ali Wong as a nurse. Their presence is unremarked upon, which is to say the film casts them and then asks nothing of them. This is ordinary comedic hiring, not a statement. Close's Helen, a woman of a certain age with an enthusiastic romantic history, is played for bawdy laughs. Nobody in the production appears to have consulted a manifesto. The screenplay contains no thesis on race, class, gender, or the environment, and no character pauses the action to instruct the audience on how to live.

What the film does contain is a hitchhiker who dispenses fortune-cookie wisdom, a proctologist's midlife crisis, and a final act that reveals an adoption, a dead mother, and a satisfying vacation in Maui. The cultural ledger here is close to blank. Father Figures is not a lecture. It is not a sermon. It is a comedy that was shot in 2015, sat on a shelf, was reshot to improve an ending, and then released into a marketplace that had moved on. We can respect it for its refusal to preach. We cannot respect much else.