It was perhaps a mistake to re-watch Jason Robards with Phillip Seymour Hoffman and that searing monologue on regret. My wife and I keep discussing this to no good end, but we've swept in Hallmark movies and their popularity into the same bin. There's just a desire for a final realization, a closing reconciliation, as a deathbed setting plays out -- and it never happens. It's so striking to me that art is filled with these episodes, and life has brought me so many conversations with people frustrated or even furious that they could not get there. My own recent bout with that setting, sitting in Parma's chair, was an extended spiral of intensifying rationalization and self-justification in the face of all facts. Plus my sister and I are going through this with our mother, whose grandiosity and narcissism is only swelling monstrously with increasing Alzheimer's symptoms.
So it's a great scene, and a powerful possibility: I'm just left feeling like my wife is correct, and that Earl & Frank & Parma are like a very dark but still sunlit Hallmark story where despite the obstacles and complication, there will come a moment of reflection and regret. Just like all the lonely big city career women will end up with the flannel-shirted axe throwing husbandman in an aesthetically pleasing rural idyll, and an old tractor that will finally start running smoothly just before the minute 118 kiss.
Great comment — and I tend to agree in general. I’m just not sure the Earl/Frank reconciliation is actually Hallmark-ish. There is no “I love you dad, let’s hug it out” moment. Just two broken men staring, regretfully, at one another. The only difference is that, now, they at least know they’re broken.
Oh, totally agree that "Magnolia" isn't Hallmarkian, just that the idea of a final realization or deathbed reconciliation is a common hope which sadly I've just never seen -- and the disappointment that it didn't happen, even when the adult child has been reconciled for decades to the parent's hard shell, but expected something different as the end drew recognizably near, is a pastoral challenge I've had to help people through many times (and am going through right now). It's that expectation there will be *some* sort of reckoning with regret and loss that I'm labelling part of the wider Hallmark worldview.
I cannot imagine what doing that scene took for Robards, given his own personal history to that point, let alone his own impending mortality. His internal process had to be difficult . . . or maybe not. Maybe it was just another gig, but I sure can't imagine that level of compartmentalization. It also reminded me of his scene with Steve Martin in "Parenthood" about how you never cross the goal line and spike the ball as a parent. THAT scene has stuck with me as a parent, for dang sure.
It was perhaps a mistake to re-watch Jason Robards with Phillip Seymour Hoffman and that searing monologue on regret. My wife and I keep discussing this to no good end, but we've swept in Hallmark movies and their popularity into the same bin. There's just a desire for a final realization, a closing reconciliation, as a deathbed setting plays out -- and it never happens. It's so striking to me that art is filled with these episodes, and life has brought me so many conversations with people frustrated or even furious that they could not get there. My own recent bout with that setting, sitting in Parma's chair, was an extended spiral of intensifying rationalization and self-justification in the face of all facts. Plus my sister and I are going through this with our mother, whose grandiosity and narcissism is only swelling monstrously with increasing Alzheimer's symptoms.
So it's a great scene, and a powerful possibility: I'm just left feeling like my wife is correct, and that Earl & Frank & Parma are like a very dark but still sunlit Hallmark story where despite the obstacles and complication, there will come a moment of reflection and regret. Just like all the lonely big city career women will end up with the flannel-shirted axe throwing husbandman in an aesthetically pleasing rural idyll, and an old tractor that will finally start running smoothly just before the minute 118 kiss.
Great comment — and I tend to agree in general. I’m just not sure the Earl/Frank reconciliation is actually Hallmark-ish. There is no “I love you dad, let’s hug it out” moment. Just two broken men staring, regretfully, at one another. The only difference is that, now, they at least know they’re broken.
Oh, totally agree that "Magnolia" isn't Hallmarkian, just that the idea of a final realization or deathbed reconciliation is a common hope which sadly I've just never seen -- and the disappointment that it didn't happen, even when the adult child has been reconciled for decades to the parent's hard shell, but expected something different as the end drew recognizably near, is a pastoral challenge I've had to help people through many times (and am going through right now). It's that expectation there will be *some* sort of reckoning with regret and loss that I'm labelling part of the wider Hallmark worldview.
I cannot imagine what doing that scene took for Robards, given his own personal history to that point, let alone his own impending mortality. His internal process had to be difficult . . . or maybe not. Maybe it was just another gig, but I sure can't imagine that level of compartmentalization. It also reminded me of his scene with Steve Martin in "Parenthood" about how you never cross the goal line and spike the ball as a parent. THAT scene has stuck with me as a parent, for dang sure.
Much wisdom in that comment!