Harry & Son

Harry & Son is one of just five feature films Paul Newman directed during his long career in movies. While I can't say the film is a success, it is full of good scenes played well, but by an overqualified cast. The film stars Newman as widower Harry Keach, a construction worker raised to appreciate the importance of working for a living. Harry does not get on well with his listless, artistic, and sometimes hedonistic son Howard (Robby Benson), who still lives with him. He also has a strained relationship with his daughter Nina (Katherine Borowitz), who he views as stuck-up ever since she married a wimpy insurance salesman. But when Harry gets fired from his job, he's forced to focus on his family relationships. But, like most of the roles Newman wrote, produced, or directed for himself, Harry is kind of a bastard. He's an introverted, angry man unable to express himself fully.

The film is an interesting father-and-son character study, but it gets sidetracked and bogged down with too many subplots that aren't really subplots at all, just incidents. One example is Benson's brief foray into the life of a repo man, which is kind of wild considering this picture was released on the same day, March 2nd, 1984, as Repo Man. In this little narrative detour, Benson learns that the life of a repo man is too intense for him when he tries to take a car owned by Ossie Davis. Much later, we get a follow-up scene where we learn what became of Davis's character, but there's really no reason to have this guy come back into the story except that he's played by Ossie Davis. That type of situation typifies this movie, with its stacked cast of heavy hitters, including Ellen Barkin, Wilford Brimley, Judith Ivey, Morgan Freeman, and Joanne Woodward, cluttering up the story of Harry and his son rather than enhancing it.

Newman's directing career was so much more low-key and personal than that of his frequent co-star Robert Redford. The five movies he directed—Rachel, Rachel (1968), Sometimes a Great Notion (1970), The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972), Harry & Son (1984), and The Glass Menagerie (1987)—were all films in which he directed either himself or his wife, Joanne Woodward, in small roles that explore the internal struggles of a character who presents as one-dimensional in their daily life but have a lot going on behind their impossibly attractive face. Newman has one of the most fascinating careers in Hollywood—a rare star of the 1960s whose performances only got better the more he aged. But as a director, he almost seems to want to push viewers away.