Movies are giving dads their due

As a producer and a studio executive, Richard Gladstein was involved in any number of graphic and sadistic films, including “Reservoir Dogs,” “Hurlyburly” and “Pulp Fiction.” So what’s he been up to lately? “Finding Neverland,” a tender account of writer J.M. Barrie’s loving relationship with a fatherless family.

“Having made a lot of dark movies in my life, I can’t really watch human suffering anymore,” says Gladstein, the father of a 4-year-old boy.

Then there’s Paul Haggis, who created a father-daughter estrangement subplot for the screenplay of “Million Dollar Baby,” which tracks the relationship between the boxing coach Frankie (Clint Eastwood) and the essentially parentless pugilist hopeful Maggie (Hilary Swank). “Family is the most important thing in my life,” says Haggis, also a dad.

And writer-director James L. Brooks, yet another Hollywood father, has created in “Spanglish” a saintly and sensitive character for Adam Sandler: a renowned chef who finds time to gently drill his daughter for a history test and converse movingly with his family’s nanny about his aching love for his kids. “The marketing line of mine that I wanted that everybody threw out was, ‘Decency Is Sexy,’ ” Brooks says.

Hollywood may have self-absorbed mothers in its crosshairs (take a look at Tea Leoni’s turn as Sandler’s wife in “Spanglish,” Meryl Streep’s master manipulator in “The Manchurian Candidate” and the greedy, trailer-trash mom from “Million Dollar Baby”). But selfless fathers and father figures are being celebrated, if not canonized, on America’s movie screens.

Perhaps not since Dustin Hoffman whipped up French toast for his son in “Kramer vs. Kramer” has there been such prominent display given to the demonstrative dad: Movies such as “Finding Neverland,” “Million Dollar Baby,” “In Good Company,” “Spanglish” and “Hotel Rwanda” all concentrate much of their narratives around life-affirming father-child relationships.

Is this all a calculated show business rejoinder to the election-season debate about Hollywood and its presumed disconnect with heartland values? The filmmakers behind these movies say that isn’t the case. Furthermore, movie studios’ upcoming slates offer numerous targets for conservative critics: grisly horror movies, raunchy teen comedies, even another Michael Moore documentary.

But what’s interesting about this small outbreak of appealing, even old-fashioned paternalism is that it arrives in such high concentration from such high-class filmmakers. “Finding Neverland” and “Million Dollar Baby” are favorites for best picture Oscar nominations, and each has collected several awards and nominations in year-end balloting by critics’ groups.

It’s not just the big studio movies that are exploring father-child bonds. Writer-director Shainee Gabel’s independently produced “A Love Song for Bobby Long,” which debuts Wednesday, has at its center a father’s struggle to reconnect with a separated daughter. The makers of “William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice,” also opening Wednesday, focused much of writer-director Michael Radford’s adaptation on the strained relationship between Shylock and his daughter, Jessica, in part to make the moneylender more sympathetic.

Movie studios have long been drawn to films that appeal to family audiences and try to market much of their output -- from “Shrek” to “Spider-Man” -- to every possible demographic group, even if they are not obvious family stories. A number of past best picture Oscar winners, including “Rain Man” and “A Beautiful Mind,” featured positive messages about family ties. Yet in many other movies, parenthood was as likely to spark a vengeance plot as to anchor a love story.

“It’s easier for filmmakers to make the mistake of writing about and directing despicable people,” says “Finding Neverland” producer Gladstein. “I think it’s harder to tell a story about a wonderful person and make it interesting.”

Gladstein’s movie, which was directed by “Monster’s Ball” filmmaker Marc Forster and adapted by screenwriter David Magee, is loosely based on the life of “Peter Pan” author Barrie, played by Johnny Depp. Much of the film deals with Barrie’s relationship with the recently widowed Sylvia Llewelyn Davies and her children, particularly a boy named Peter. Their bond, unusual or even eyebrow-raising by contemporary standards, is presented in the movie as chaste and quasi-parental; Barrie helps Peter and his siblings deal with their mother’s dying, while Peter helps inspire Barrie to write his masterwork.

“When you become a parent, your heart and your mind change,” says Gladstein, who dedicated the film to his son, Milo. “While I am thrilled to have worked on those [earlier violent] films, and I completely enjoyed it, that genre of films, those storylines, are not that interesting to me now as they once were.”

Paul Weitz, the writer-director of “In Good Company,” is also a new dad to an infant daughter and is seeking to inject family dynamics into his work. “Families are the places where real drama takes place, but it’s hard to plumb them in an accurate way,” Weitz says. “It’s hard to find drama in daily occurrences. And just because a movie is about a family doesn’t mean it has real emotion.”

“In Good Company,” opening Wednesday, follows two main, and ultimately intersecting, stories: The first is the demotion of 51-year-old ad salesman Dan (Dennis Quaid) and the promotion of the fast-rising 26-year-old Carter (Topher Grace) into Dan’s former job. The second plot tracks the romance between Carter and Dan’s daughter, Alex (Scarlett Johansson).

Even though Carter appears skilled at climbing the corporate ladder, “he’s not very good with the rest of his life,” says Weitz. “On the surface, he’s extremely functional. But on the inside, he’s a complete wreck.”

At the very moment that Carter’s career takes off, his brief marriage collapses, and Carter can find some much-needed family comfort only in the home of the very person he has displaced at work. On a parallel plane, as Dan’s professional life falls apart, his family life becomes both more of a challenge and more of a reward. Dan must wrestle with his daughter’s independence, particularly her love affair with Carter, even as he struggles to provide for her costly education.

“My brother said to me, ‘I’ve never seen a scene where someone goes to get a second mortgage,’ ” Weitz says. “It’s not the kind of scene you see making its way into studio movies.”

Offscreen, show business executives used to treat families the way they handled box-office bombs: They were dispatched to some hidden place and rarely discussed. In the last 10 years, however, a new set of senior studio executives, many of them women, has made families and parenting a central part of their lives in the industry.

Disney production chief Nina Jacobson has a playroom for her toddlers adjacent to her office, and the young children of Universal Pictures Chairman Stacey Snider, Warner Bros. Pictures production president Jeff Robinov and Sony Pictures Entertainment Vice Chairman Amy Pascal have been frequent visitors to their parents’ offices and workplace playrooms.

But while some women have brought parenting out of the nursery and into the executive suite, many of those behind the latest crop of family-themed movies are men, drawing on personal experiences.

When screenwriter Haggis set out to adapt the boxing stories of F.X. Toole into “Million Dollar Baby,” which Eastwood also directed, there was no subplot about Frankie’s estrangement from his daughter. But in creating that void in the boxing coach’s life, Haggis was able to conceive a shared need for personal connection between Frankie and Maggie.

“I liked the idea that Frankie had issues that were never resolved, things for which he could never be forgiven. It’s a longing for family that just kills him,” Haggis says. “Estrangement was something I had lived through in my life, so I knew the pain of that. I could not have written this story if I had not gone through this with my own daughter,” Haggis says, adding that they have reconciled.

“We do write about what we experience,” he says. “And you really need to experience some pain in your life in order to write about redemption.”