Fathers and Daughters

This is a good film that gives a fair outline of one of the many kinds of battles dad's face trying to bring up their own children. While the circumstances to the story are particular to this film, there are many other even more general conditions under which dad's struggle to keep children in the face of society's general view that fathers are "unfit" to bring up children on their own. Where the film fails is that it portrays this problem as peculiar to the particular circumstances faced by Crowe's character rather than deploying a much more common and everyday reality of many fathers. This fair portrayal of the issue could have gone much further and much deeper in penetrating the pervasiveness of the battles fathers face today rather than associating it with the particular and unrepresentative individual of the "writer-artist" portrayed at the centre of the film. What is incontestable is the damage the outcomes of these familiar scenarios and all too common legal and social welfare battles have on children. The fantasy part is where the child recovers - we know they dont, generally. I give this film 5 stars for raising an important and pervasive issue, but 1 star for the stereotypical Hollywood treatment it gets, and the association of the problem with such unlikely central protagonists.