Jersey Girl (2004)

Kevin Smith, a filmmaker whose commercial identity rested on dick jokes delivered by men in long coats, stepped outside the View Askewniverse in 2004 to make a movie about a widower learning to love his daughter. The result is a gentle, shapeless thing, a comedy-drama that arrives with its heart on its sleeve and its ambitions modest. Ben Affleck plays Ollie Trinke, a New York music publicist whose wife dies in childbirth, leaving him to raise a daughter in his father's New Jersey home. The film wants us to feel the slow recalibration of a man's priorities. It succeeds, in the manner of a greeting card, which is to say it succeeds at being pleasant and forgettable in equal measure.

The cast is white to a degree that feels almost architectural, with Jennifer Lopez and Raquel Castro offering the only variation, and their presence is incidental to the story, never a statement. Liv Tyler's Maya is a graduate student with opinions, but the screenplay assigns her the function of romantic prize, waiting patiently for the hero to finish his emotional homework. There is a faint tsk-tsking about Ollie's yuppie publicist past, a soft suggestion that small-town fatherhood beats Manhattan ambition, though the film never indicts the economy so much as it mourns a career. George Carlin, in his last live-action role, plays the father with weary grace and steals what there is to steal.

Everything else sits at zero. No climate anxieties, no body politics, no neurodivergent interiority, no historical revision, no queer subtext, no racial argument. The movie is sentimental and occasionally preachy about parenthood, but it sermonizes through melodrama, through a child screaming that she wishes he had died instead, which lands harder than any lesson. It is a film about a man learning to show up. That is all it is. We can respect the modesty without mistaking it for depth.