The 10 Best Movies About Fatherhood1 min read

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Changing a nappy in a busy railway carriage can only be mastered through practice. But other than that, everything I know about fatherhood I learned from the movies. Cinema has a long-standing affection for fathers, and countless ideas about what it takes to be a good one. So for Father’s Day, here are 10 films which beautifully express the wonder and joy and occasional churning terror of being a father ““ and which all hugely contributed to my own understanding of what fatherhood means.

1. The Royal Tenenbaums

When a family shatters like a china teacup, what does it take to glue it back together? In Wes Anderson’s bittersweet breakthrough hit from 2001, ageing rascal Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) hopes the news he’s suffering from terminal stomach cancer might be a catalyst for emotional healing, and he makes contact with his estranged wife Ethel (Anjelica Huston) and three gifted, fragile grown-up children (Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson), with a view to patching things up.

Anderson and his co-writer, Owen Wilson, build a hilarious, detailed portrait of paternal dysfunction and slow-cooked familial grudges, driven onwards by Royal’s slowly dawning awareness that a family is something more than a name.

“I always wanted to be a Tenenbaum, you know?” pines Wilson’s Eli Cash, a tragic long-term family friend and perennial outsider. It’s Royal’s hushed aside ““ “Me too, me too” ““ that lets us know where he’s been going wrong.

Read the full article here >> Via Telegraph

Image Credit Telegraph