The family comedy has always been a staple of the Hollywood summer calendar, with early-summer blockbusters acting as cultural bellwethers. They are the movies that define eras, like The Goonies and Big in the ’80s. Yet for every E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, there is a Mac and Me — it’s a beloved genre that elicits plenty of nostalgia, but there are more bad entries than good. As much as we may want to love a lighthearted family comedy with local ties and a likable lead, Old Hickory native Nate Bargatze’s The Breadwinner is one of the genre’s more forgettable recent entries.
The Breadwinner
PG, 100 minutes
Opening Thursday, May 28, at Regal and AMC theaters
Nate Wilcox (Bargatze) is a successful Toyota salesman and his household’s sole breadwinner, supporting his stay-at-home wife Katie (Mandy Moore) and their three daughters. Katie takes an invention onto the show Shark Tank, where she is given a conditional offer — she’ll get financing for her project, but only if Nate takes time off from work to be a stay-at-home dad. The catch: Nate is completely and utterly incompetent at anything and everything other than selling cars. He has to survive being a single parent for two weeks while Katie develops her business.
As one might gather from the premise alone, this is a film that feels outdated on arrival. The idea that a nuclear family still needs a stay-at-home parent is one that feels unreflective of the times. Most American households are now dual-income, and most two-parent households see both adults working full time and still providing childcare. The insistence from The Breadwinner’s characters that there needs to be one stay-at-home parent indirectly demonizes parents who want to work. Seeing a car salesman providing for a family of five in a large, two-story house in the suburbs — with the main conflict stemming from his wife receiving equity investment to start a business — is out of touch with modern reality. At times it feels almost insulting. The incompetent-dad trope — centering on a man who is completely unable to take care of himself and relies on his wife to do everything — is sadder than it is funny. It attempts to center on the difficulty faced by stay-at-home moms, but also leans on tired gender roles by depicting the film’s only other stay-at-home dad as hyper effeminate.
The Breadwinner is also laden with product placements — and the Toyota placements feel particularly egregious. Nate’s die-hard Tennessee Titan fandom functions as a major MacGuffin in the film’s plot, leading to awkward clashes between Nissan Stadium’s signage and the film’s frequent Toyota mentions. An ex machina Walmart-centric portion of the film breaks any semblance of cinematic immersion, feeling more like a commercial break or an unskippable ad.
The Breadwinner is a Nashville-set family comedy that probably doesn’t feature enough Nashville in it to gain a local cult following, but it’s also not the sort of trainwreck that can provide ironic entertainment. It relies on outdated ideas of gender roles in a nuclear family — gender roles that are fading from memory more and more by the year. It attempts to evoke nostalgia from previous decades, but you can’t define a generation if you’re stuck in the previous one.
