Word: fatherhood
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Bill Cosby not only talked the talk of fatherhood, he walked the walk. Ennis Cosby was not a brat. He was a teacher. Now it's his father who'll have to be one. Bill Cosby has a new role as a model of loss, a paragon of violent bereavement. In Hollywood, privileged, unreal, incredible Hollywood, where imagination transforms reality, reality is taking the upper hand. It's as though the gods of drama have ordained that our entertainers must now act out America's most awful true-life conflicts, no longer just its escapist fantasies...
Columbus sidesteps certain iffy issues raised in the French original--where the man, on hearing of his impending fatherhood, says to his girlfriend, "I have the honor to ask you to have an abortion," and later has a sexual fling on the side--for more general, genial comedy. The movie also gets unwontedly frantic toward the end, with slapstick brawls and auto injuries. (Note to Hollywood: Can you outlaw funny car crashes, starting right now?) But the film has a cleverness that is as irresistible as it is predictable, and Grant eventually looks comfortable in the main role...
...like Marcia Clark, the prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson case, may have the most to worry about. In a flurry of recent custody battles, women who don't conform to the Donna Reed notion of motherhood have lost custody to men who slightly exceed Homer Simpson's idea of fatherhood...
Bill Cosby started the trend in 1986 with Fatherhood. A bunch of his stand- up material collected in 178 easy-to-read pages. Sold 2.5 million copies in hardback and spent 55 weeks on the best-seller list. Then last year came SeinLanguage, which has sold 1.2 million so far. Like people aren't getting enough of this guy on Thursday nights...
...starkest drama can always use a leavening of wit. For most of the film, he underplays Forrest's reactions at a level somewhere between a fretful deadpan and the rural slyness of the early Andy Griffith. So when he releases his feelings at the end (when questions of fatherhood and family traits are involved), the scene gushes like a geyser...