A REVIEW OF A MOVIE I BARELY REMEMBER*: With Parenthood, a TV show, debuting some time this fall on the Haiti of TV networks, I thought it would be worth a quick, research-free examination of the show's source material, 1989's Parenthood, a movie.
When Parenthood (pronounced, according to my friends' unfunny joke, "Paren Thood") came out in 1989, the world was a different place. Everybody in America lived in large colonial revival houses in leafy suburbs. You may not remember this, but back then, before European explorers discovered gay urban gentrification and the entertainment value of gunplay, it was quite common to make a movie like Parenthood. So common that Steve Martin managed to make two, simultaneously, on the same set, with the same director and many of the same actors -- in fact, both Parenthood and Father of the Bride even use common footage spliced into both reels. This doesn't quite explain why, at 19 years old, I saw the movie, and frankly, I cannot remember or imagine the circumstances that led me to the theater, although I'm sure it happened. In that respect, this movie is like sleep-eating or an alien abduction.
The central struggle in Parenthood is that Steve Martin is extremely successful but feels like maybe he should be only very successful, because his father is a dick. Essentially, he wants to be exactly successful enough to assume the role of patriarch of his extended family without worrying about the mortgage on his large colonial revival house in a leafy suburb, and any of his success beyond that is just wasted success. He has one son who he believes is a psychotic murderer in training, but who actually is only a chronic masturbator who sexualizes a brown paper bag and is exactly as weird as the actor playing him will grow up to be. His other son wears a garbage can on his head and runs into walls.
Nobody in the entire extended family looks the least bit alike. If you were to do a statistical study of caucasian DNA and identify the ten or so samples least like each other, you would have identified the cast of Parenthood.
A lot of the middle parts of this are hazy, but I'm pretty sure three things happen: (1) somebody walks in on Martha Plimpton having sex; (2) somebody accidentally activates Dianne Wiest's vibrator in the middle of a family gathering; and (3) Steve Martin's brother, Tom Hulce, shows up, unannounced, with a biracial son named Cool in tow. You could think a long time about what it's supposed to signify that Hulce's son is a ridiculously named biracial kid and that the family is scandalized, either by the race or the profession (Las Vegas showgirl, anachronistic even in 1989) of the mother, but don't get too worked up. Nothing in this movie means anything -- it is a grab-bag of prefabricated folly slapped together without concern for cogency, so if you try to dig into subtext you'll hurt only yourself. Anyway, Hulce is the black sheep of the family, the anti-Steve Martin, because his self-loathing has its roots in failure (rather than excessive success) and his response to it is to fail more (rather than succeeding).
As an aside, it is difficult to decide which was worse: Hulce's performance or his being cast in the first place. He is supposed to be a chronic fuckup and self-styled rebel with fraying ties to his middle-class past, but Hulce makes no effort to suppress his college-theater diction and demeanor, relying instead on a bad MTV Veejay Mark Goodman Halloween costume to create the character for him. Hulce as a dead-end drifter must rank up there with Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist and Tara Reid as a southern trophy wife in the annals of credulity-straining performances.
I'm quite sure some other things happen, including Hulce's inevitable and welcome disappearance, but I can't remember exactly what. What I do recall is that the movie ends with everybody suddenly and simultaneously giving birth.
You can see why this needed to be made into a television series.
*Due to fading memory, some facts in this review may be inaccurate.
