Fathers and Daughters

Fathers and Daughters (2015) runs on two timelines and cuts between them throughout. In the past, Pulitzer winning novelist Jake Davis loses his wife in a car accident and is left with a five year old daughter. His own mental health collapses, he is hospitalised, and relatives move to take the child. In the present, that daughter is grown, works as a therapist, and cannot let anyone near her. The thesis is plain: what a child lives through arrives again twenty years later. The problem is that the film does not trust you to see it. Every emotional beat is underlined with score and slow motion. That is where critics stopped, though audience scores run considerably higher. Russell Crowe is unusually fragile here, which is not how he is normally cast. Amanda Seyfried has the harder role and holds it steadily. Good for: father and daughter stories, openly emotional drama, and viewers who do not mind knowing where a film is going. Less good for: the adult daughter's trauma is dramatised largely through sexual behaviour, and mental illness and suicide are both present. Anyone looking for restraint will find this heavy handed.