The male response to "Terms of Endearment" fails badly at all levels as it's neither charming with its chaotic humor and neither fully satisfies
as a drama. It breaks my heart to see Paul Newman being lead actor/director/writer of a piece so strange, trying to be too many things all at once
and not delivering a single right note that makes us care for it. It's one of those cases that you may enjoy the performances (as he got a great
ensemble with Ellen Barkin, Wilford Brimley, Judith Ivey, Ossie Davis, Morgan Freeman and Newman's wife Joanne Woodward), enjoy some of the situations but you
won't feel relating with anybody and won't learn anything from it, as the mountain of cliches pile up with almost no reward.
The relationship between a sick father (Newman) and his young son (Robby Benson)
is given an awkward treatment as they swing back and forth between good buddies to unknown figures to each other who bicker for pointless things, or
at times because the idealist promising writer fails to sustain a work. I sort of related with the sensitive kid failing at all the works he applied
since he's totally wrong for it, and only writing could help him to come out to life (but his writing sucks, the little it was shown).
Why "Harry and Son" is so weak and never fully works? Newman's character is too stubborn, deeply rooted in his own persona and only thinks about
himself; and even when he gets a new chance at love, with the advances from a friend of his deceased wife, he becomes a rude figure. With his son, it
gets wildly confusing as to what he really wants from the boy, reaching a point where he kicks him out of home just because his room was a mess, and
if one looks back at their very first scene, having a dinner by candlelight and having a nice talk, they never were the kind of men who were against
each others throat. As the father's disease is never mentioned (neither treated) I assume he has a brain tumor that makes him such an erratic man,
who barely generates any sympathy from the audience.
But what irritated me the most was the bizarre balance of comedy and drama, as none of them are convincing or interesting. Take the famous
dish breaking scene where the guys invite the sister/daughter and her husband to lunch and Newman presents his daughter with some fancy dishes
from the family and makes a whole "prank" that the estimated dishes break, much to the woman's horror, and ours as well. It goes from slightly funny,
to heavily dramatic as she leaves the house, moves back to funny as Newman falls on the same prank while cleaning everything, a chase ensues around
the house and then moves to more drama as he feels sick. It's the kind of thing it'd work in literature, here it just try so hard in getting a
rollercoaster of emotions that you don't know for whom to care or reject. The whole film goes in between too much drama, too much comedy and it hardly
gets right at any of those.
For a higher analysis, "Harry and Son" proves that some people will never grow or they'll never have the ability to change; others will have
changes forced upon themselves way before their times and all the learning must be done quickly. But I've seen better with such proof. As a personal project
for Mr. Newman, this lacked coherence, passion and heart. Like his character, a demolition crane operator, he crashes everything down in what could
be a good film. 5/10.
