The Absent Minded Father

It’s no secret that I have a huge literary crush on Anthony Lane from the New Yorker. His swiftly executed stabs at Tom Cruise and other Hollywood royals make my heart go pitter-pat.

His review of “Pride and Prejudice” and “The Bee Season” was especially good. He skewers both films, but also finds commonalties between them. They both feature the intellectual dad.

He proclaims Mr. Bennett to be his favorite fictional character.

There are three more Bennet sisters, whose idiocy thickens in inverse proportion to their age; a mewing mother (Brenda Blethyn), her cheeks prawn-pink with the exertion of marrying off her brood; and a father (Donald Sutherland), who listens to the farmlike cacklings of the household and, quite properly, shuts his study door. I know that we are meant to treat Mr. Bennet’s disengagement from the fray as moral cowardice, but he remains my favorite character in fiction, and anybody who has raised children will applaud his penchant for bookish retreat as a mark of tactical sanity.

He first laughs at casting Richard Gere as a Professor of Theology in “the Bee Season”.

There are many mysteries in “Bee Season,” but the greatest conundrum has to be: in what parallel universe would Binoche marry Gere? Also, do we believe him as a Kabbalistic scholar? I was happy to salute him as a robotic fornicator in “American Gigolo,” but, given that his sole means of signalling brain activity is to go very still and shut his eyes, the world of academia may not be his patch.

Unlike Mr. Bennett who sensibly hides behind his books to avoid messy girlie dramas, Gere’s character, Saul, uses books as weapons of child abuse.

In the role of Saul, he becomes obsessed by his daughter’s progress from school bees through to the nationals, in Washington, but instead of testing her on “casuistry” and “arrhythmia,” like any other pushy dad, he inducts her into the methodology of Jewish mysticism. He even lends her a copy of his Ph.D. thesis, at which point I didn’t know whether to stay with the movie or run out and call social services.

On rainy winter days, when we don’t know what to do with our kids, we inflict them on our parents. All five grandchildren ages 1 to 7 run around the tiny Cape Cod and the volume goes up to eleven.

Dad, like Mr. Bennett, will retreat to the office where the door will somewhat muffle the screams of my three year old. Eventually, he will step forth with a deck of president cards. He drills the older ones on matching the face with the name, reciting them in the proper order, and recounting the deaths of a few favorites. It is all done with a smile on his face knowing how absurd it is to see a six year old relate the unfortunate inauguration address of William Henry Harrison.

How we amuse ourselves at the expense of our kids.