A single man who has no great attachments in life is, by some complicated chain of circumstances, entrusted with the care of someone else’s child. Adventures ensue, and along the way both child and unlikely guardian do their own share of growing up. As an essential story premise, it’s been a Hollywood go-to for over a century, at least since Charlie Chaplin awkwardly took on a foundling infant in silent classic The Kid.
It’s a trope that often lends itself to gloopy sentimentality and pat buddy comedy – but writer-director Mike Mills avoids both those pitfalls in his altogether lovely film C’mon C’mon, now out for home viewing after getting rather too little attention in cinemas. It’s a film both comforting and bracing, warming viewers with the feelings of tender uplift that we usually get from stories of people learning to care for each other – before surprising us with uneasy, nuanced questions about 21st-century parenthood and the future we’re leaving our children.
Coming right off Joker, Joaquin Phoenix is pretty ideally cast as the guy who wouldn’t be your first (or fifth) choice of emergency guardian for your child, and it’s a treat to see him exercising the sweeter, softer side of his screen persona. He plays travelling radio journalist Johnny, adrift after a recent breakup and estranged from his sister Viv (a wonderful Gaby Hoffmann), who is overwhelmed by the pressures of motherhood to wayward nine-year-old Jesse (Woody Norman) even before a family crisis forces her to leave the boy in her brother’s uncertain hands.
Initially wary of each other, uncle and nephew come to recognise their shared eccentricities and anxieties, and grow quietly, profoundly close that way. The great joy of Mills’s writing is that he treats adults and children as intellectual and psychological equals, complex and confused in equal measure. And in Norman he has unlocked a remarkably perceptive, witty young actor; the young British star’s Bafta nomination is well deserved, though the film as a whole has been under-rewarded.
No matter. Paper Moon (Apple TV), one of the films Mills has cited as an inspiration, also got less than its due back in 1973 and is a firmly entrenched classic now. The sharp, snappy comic chemistry between Ryan O’Neal and his real-life daughter Tatum – as thrust-together cons who are clearly two peas in a pod, however much he denies paternity – still crackles, powering the late Peter Bogdanovich’s road movie along a perfectly balanced line between cuteness and vinegary cynicism. Tonally, Mills’s film perhaps owes more to Wim Wenders’s spare, breezily melancholic Alice in the Cities (1974; BFI Player), which also takes interest in the shared damage of a shambling guardian and his ward, and how they care for each other.
Chaplin’s aforementioned The Kid (Curzon) essentially perfected the genre straight away: as the Little Tramp’s initially amusing childcare exploits give way to full-waterworks custody melodrama, its cry-laugh-cry-again manipulations still work like gangbusters 101 years later. If you’re mostly after films that make you go “awwww”, meanwhile, Czech film-maker Jan Svěrák’s 1996 crowdpleaser Kolya – in which a middle-aged Prague wastrel is lumped with a five-year-old Russian poppet, prompting bonding across linguistic barriers – still absolutely does the job. It won an Oscar in its day, and easy as it is to be cynical about its heartstring-tugging, you can see why. And if you want slightly spikier comedy, Taika Waititi’s rollicking wilderness romp Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016; Amazon Prime), about an orphaned teen and his foster father surviving a manhunt, raises the usual stakes a little.
Finally, men don’t have a monopoly on unsuitable babysitting in the movies. You can only find Tilda Swinton’s tour de force in Julia (2008) – playing an alcoholic kidnapper turned rescuer – on DVD, though it’s worth the hunt. But you can stream Gena Rowlands’s ferocious star turn in John Cassavetes’s Gloria (1980; Google Play), as a gangster’s moll on the run with a boy targeted by the mob, and it’s a thrill: as heart-in-mouth urgent as C’mon C’mon is gently contemplative, and no less wise for it.
Also new on streaming on DVD
Glasgow Film at Home
Once again, the Glasgow film festival, which runs from 2-13 March, is offering a selection of highlights from this year’s programme on their streaming platform. Among the titles worth seeking out: Yuni, a striking Indonesian coming-of-age tale of a teen facing an arranged marriage, which won top prize at Toronto last year; Hive, a hopeful, Sundance-laurelled Kosovan study of female entrepreneurship; and True Things, a taut, erotic psychodrama with a sensational Ruth Wilson performance.
Cicada
(Amazon/Apple TV)
New York film-maker Matthew Fifer directs, writes, produces, edits and stars in this autobiographical, woozily atmospheric labour-of-love indie about two Brooklyn men hesitantly falling in love and overcoming past trauma. It’s small and shaggy, but shot through with interesting, intersectional ideas about class, race, privilege and queerness that keep it from navel-gazing.
Becoming Cousteau
(Dogwoof)
That Liz Garbus’s Bafta-nominated documentary about history’s most famous oceanographer is co-produced by two of his children doesn’t bode well, but this intelligently assembled portrait generally avoids hagiography, inserting some critical perspective amid its more transporting moments. Still, it hews awfully close to a standard bio-doc formula.
