25 Great Movies About Fathers

“Field Of Dreams” (1989)
“If you build it, they will come.” Over the past two decades, that sentence has become an oft-quoted mantra for self-helpers everywhere. What’s often forgotten, though, is that it was said by a voice in a cornfield, which could easily be a higher being, or for the skeptics, an Iowan farmer’s hallucination. That farmer, Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner), decides to heed this advice and overturns his cornfield to build a baseball field. The Voice goes on to tell him to “ease his pain,” and Ray continues to build, as various ghostly players turn up, eventually including his father, who passed away when he was 17, and he’s eventually able to resolve his abandonment issues by playing catch with his ghost. A film so weird in concept that it’s easy to forget what a big hit it was, and featuring a Kevin Costner performance that might be the very peak of his all-American appeal, Phil Alden Robinson‘s film gets the right balance of sentimentality and smarts, so the ending successfully pulls at the heartstrings and the audience will get teary, even if you just watch the three-and-a-half-minute scene on your laptop.

“Finding Nemo” (2003)
Pixar’s animated classic (which gets a well-timed sequel in time for Father’s Day this weekend) follows overprotective father Marlin (voiced by Albert Brooks), who is willing to overcome his fear of everything in order to save his son, Nemo (voiced by Alexander Gould). More than anything Pixar’d done before, the film’s unafraid to present the harsh truths inherent in the growing-up process (not least in an opening scene as traumatizing as anything since the death of Bambi’s mom) by focusing in on the anxieties parents have towards letting their children go out into the world without them. Marlin’s coddling of Nemo pushes the young clownfish to act out, which causes the kidnapping that brings about the trajectory of the narrative. As the movie goes through its paces, Marlin eventually comes to the understanding that he has to let his son lead his own life or else create a bubble in which Nemo‘s life is plotted out with nothing exciting to look forward to. As Marlin’s doofy companion Dory (voiced by Ellen DeGeneres) says, “You can’t never let anything happen to him. Then nothing would ever happen to him.”

“Floating Weeds” (1959)
Perhaps fittingly for a filmmaker whose work is so elegiac and so concerned with the different ways that a young and an old person might see the world, Yasujiro Ozu returned to his own stories more than once. A remake of his 1934 silent “A Story Of Floating Weeds,” “Floating Weeds” stars Ganjiro Nakamura as Komajuro, the head of a traveling theater company who arrive in the seaside town where he has a son, Kiyoshi (Hiroshi Kawaguchi), who isn’t aware of his parentage. But any bonding is disrupted when Sumiko (Machiko Kyo), Komajuro’s current lover, becomes jealous and pays Kayo (Ayako Wakao), another actress, to seduce Kiyoshi. Ozu was a filmmaker who dwelled on family in virtually all of his films, with fathers looming especially large even in his earlier and more comic work like 1932’s “I Was Born, But…,” but while the web of relationships in “Floating Weeds” is a broad one, it’s the unspoken parental bond between Komajuro and Kiyoshi that’s at the very center. As atmospheric, generous, calm and controlled as any of his other films, if anything, it’s even more subtle and low-key than the silent version, the filmmaker having refined his craft substantially. Truthful, beautiful and incredibly moving, it’s as illustrative of the human condition as anything (and everything) the director ever made.

“Fly Away Home” (1996)
Not to sound like an old men yelling at clouds, but they just don’t make kids movies like “Fly Away Home” these days. A vehicle for a post-Oscar win Anna Paquin, and based loosely on a true story, it sees 13-year-old New Zealander Amy uprooted to Canada to stay with her self-absorbed, bohemian father (Jeff Daniels) after her mom dies. But they soon find common ground after she finds a nest of orphaned goose eggs: Not knowing how to fly South without their mother, they’ll have to have their wings clipped. Unless, of course, Amy and her dad can teach them with the aid of some microlight aircraft. It sounds like it could be treacly, cutesy animal stuff, but in the hands of longtime Francis Ford Coppola pal Carroll Ballard (“The Black Stallion”), it’s mostly understated and unsentimental, with an almost documentary-like feel in places (plus some stunning aerial photography when the time comes). And Robert Rodat and Vince McKewin’s script is at its best in showing the burgeoning relationship between Paquin and Daniels, one that doesn’t come easy, but proves to be really rather moving once they break through to each other.

“The Godfather” (1972)
One of the first mega-blockbusters (and a decidedly classier kind than what we get nowadays), the gargantuan critical and commercial success which followed the release of Francis Ford Coppola‘s “The Godfather” still ripples today. The series runs a gamut of audiences few films can compete with, serving as a cultural touchstone for everyone from teenage hoodlums to mid-western grandparents to North Korean dictators. One reason for this is that at the core of this mafia universe is a soaring fraternal-paternal succession drama which would be at home in any classical work or Shakespeare play, and yet centers on characters almost anyone could find common ground with. Hardly any film bears quite up as well to repeated viewings; over the course of its three hours, a rich tapestry of power and family politics builds towards public tragedy with increasing violence, but it is the domestic dramas — Don Vito (Marlon Brando) in the garden with his grandson, sons trying not to disappoint fathers — that draw out the true heart of Coppola’s mafia epic. Family had been featured in crime dramas before (think of James Cagney’s relationship with his mother in “White Heat“), but Coppola placed it front-and-center, with Michael’s (Al Pacino) desire not to become his father, and yet his steady transformation into him, being the beating heart of the movie (and running into the sequels, too), and it’s an approach that’s influenced almost everything in the genre ever since.