I believe this is part three of my series on Hollywood's demonization of working fathers. Working fathers are usually depicted as either missing or abusive. Lovell Milo's father was both.
This brief movie about a man who wakes up at different intervals of his life is Memento-like and interesting for the first twenty minutes. Lovell (Dylan Sprayberry and T. J. Thyne) was waking up at different ages: 8, 24, 21, 30, 26, etc. While taking pictures at a wedding he got some vague information from a little girl telling him that he's going through this to save someone. Not too long afterwards we got introduced to Dr. Orson Milo (Chris Stone), Lovell's father. He's one of the town doctors and he is a stern man. In Hollywood stern is bad for a father.
One scene was used to really drive home how bad of a father he was. Lovell was ten-years-old in this scene and was taking pictures at the dinner table. His friend and eventual wife, Grace (Elle Labadie and Paula Rhodes), was over for dinner. The doctor told his son to stop taking photos during dinner--a reasonable demand. Moments later his father fell asleep at the dinner table because he suffers from narcolepsy. Lovell used that opportunity to take a picture of his father. We already established that his father is stern. His father woke up seeing the camera in his hands and punished him by pulling the film out.
The meanie.
Then the boy called his dad an a-hole, which prompted the dad to take the camera from him.
More meanness.
It escalated to Lovell trying to grab the camera from his father and the father pushing him down and calling the pictures stupid.
Abuse!
Then, Lovell's ten-year-old girlfriend took it upon herself to scold Lovell's dad. She went upstairs and told him the pictures were not stupid and if he'd just open his eyes then he could appreciate how good they are. She did it with such authority she had to be right.
How do you think the dad took that? He summarily told the sassy little princess to get out of his house. To me it was a very appropriate reaction. Girl! You're ten and this is a family affair. Families fight and we'll settle this without your ten-year-old wisdom.
Grace, the mighty adolescent, didn't stop there. She called the police on the dad alleging abuse. Wow! That is way too far. It's one thing to think you're grown enough to lecture me, but it's another thing entirely to try to get me arrested and break up my family. But this was a small town outside of San Francisco, so maybe I should've expected that.
The father would be cemented as being evil when he would be blamed for Grace's death roughly 20 years later. Basically, Dr. Orson's narcolepsy would be the cause of him missing an urgent page to try to save Grace. Lovell couldn't handle it and wrote his dad off for good.
I know I used up a lot of words describing a small, yet significant part of the film, but it's one of those things that rubs me raw.
The movie was about moving on. After Lovell's wife Grace died he stopped living. When he had a near death experience he spoke to his wife in an astral plane and she told him that the one he had to save was himself. To be honest, that was a relief. I thought he was going through all that to save Grace from dying, which is a repeated theme--love so strong it brings someone back to life. Thankfully, that was not it. He had to fix himself and pull himself out of the rut he put himself into. So, even though the ending was better, the movie had already upset me so much that there wasn't much they could do to rescue it.
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