L'affrontement

For a kid from the posh suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio Paul Newman has a remarkable affinity for playing blue collar men. This is a guy who knows the value of hard work and it's his greatest disappointment in life is that he hasn't passed on that value to his children, Katherine Borowitz and Robby Benson.

It's Benson who Newman worries the most about. He wants to be a writer, but that just doesn't happen over night. One has to get out into the world and acquire a little life experience to learn what one wants to write about. The only one that didn't apply to was Emily Dickinson. Benson cites Hemingway as getting rejected 300 times before getting some money for his thoughts. But there certainly was a man who had himself a lot of life experience and earned a few dollars to pay his own way.

I could understand Newman very well since I came from a family of uncles just like Newman on my mother's side. I could understand Benson less so since all he wants is surf and sex. He tries working at some dead end jobs, his scenes with Morgan Freeman at a cardboard box factory and trying to repossess Ossie Davis's car are his best in the film.

In fact Newman's tragedy is that health issues cause him to stop working and he won't acknowledge them.

But it's Newman and Benson that's the heart of Harry&Son. Father and son Keach come to a kind of understanding toward the end. The film is not the best from either Newman or Benson, but nothing to be ashamed of here.

A well acted and dramatic film dealing with a construction worker and his family relationship . As Paul Newman is a depressed widower who loses his job and along the way he quarrels with their kids. As Newman is the ordinarily tired old man and we've all seen Robby Benson play the young character too many times .

The script and action are a little thin , and quite pleasantly for a while , until you start realising that Newman has decided to compose this entire movie out of them. Superb interpretations don't make up for a really boring and dull flick . It is nothing more than a constant succession of the sort of emotional peaks players love to do on screen . The result is a curiously tiring phenomenon , and sometimes indigestible and dullness . Nice duo of protagonists : Paul Newman as the widower construction labourer who faces the problems of raising his son Robby Benson, both of whom give awesome acting . Being well accompanied by a notorious plethora of secondaries as a young Ellen Barkin, Wilford Brimley , Judith Ivey , Ossie Davies , Morgan Freeman and of course Joanne Woodward .

It contais an atmospheric cinematography by Donald McAlpine , as well as sensitive and evocative musical score by Henry Mancini . The motion picture was well directed by Paul Newman , though it has a number of flaws and gaps. Being written by Ronald Buck and Paul Newman himself , dedicated to his son who early died due to overdose .The famous actor of hits as "The Hustler , Exodus , Torn Curtain , The Prize , Hud , Harper , Judge Roy Bean, Verdict , Color of Money" , among others , also directed some movies , such as : "The Glass Menagerie , The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds ,Sometimes a Great Nation , Rachel Rachel and this Harry and Son" . Rating : 6/10 , passable and acceptable . The flick will appeal to Paul Newman fans .

You see, it can be done. It is possible, even in the last decades of the 20th century, to make a good feature film that concentrates on character and eschews action. We don't need car chases to help us through the story, because we care about Harry and Howie and want to see what befalls them. Paul Newman co-wrote, directed and produced this absorbing tale of father and son, continuing his long tradition of intelligent movie-making.

Harry works the wrecking ball on a demolition site. He is a gruff, inarticulate fifty-something who likes his job. Howie is maybe 20, a dreamy young man who wants to be a writer. He has no real work, dividing his time between the car wash where he has a part-time job, his surf board and the family's hot tub, in which he does most of his writing.

And therein lies the conflict which drives this story. Harry was brought up not to question the importance of working for a living. His inflexible blue-collar morality is offended by Howie's lazy, self-indulgent lifestyle. Howie, on the other hand, grew up in a climate where self-expression and leisure activities count for more than the humdrum business of earning a living.

A medical condition forces Harry out of his job. Newman is impressive as the ageing, weakening man's man who is gutted by the loss of his livelihood, because to him it means the loss of his validity as a man. He sees Howie's vitality and intelligence and cannot come to terms with his son's lack of ambition. In one of their regular fights, Harry encapsulates the situation neatly. "I want a job and can't get one," he tells Howie. "You can, and don't."

Bright and personable, if a little too pretty in the John Travolta way, Bobby Benson plays Howie with enthusiasm. The contrast between the dour widower and his cheerful, energetic son is nicely conveyed. Supporting the two central performances are Joanne Woodward as Lillie and Ellen Barkin (Katie). Lillie is a friend of the family who develops a 'thing' about Harry. Her daughter Katie is a girl of easy morals whose relationship with Howie rekindles after a break-up.

Nice touches include the black screen at the very start which is shattered by Harry's wrecking ball, and the backlighting which gives Katie a 'halo' as she sets out her ethical position. I didn't like the too-convenient cheque which arrives from John Davidson or the ease with which secretary Sally can be suborned for sex. For me, Benson overacts horribly in the 'discovery' scene. Indeed, what happens to Harry is an unnecessarily dramatic event in this gentle, understated film.

Paul Newman wanted to make a film inspired by his troubled relationship with his own son. Scott Newman, 28, died in 1978 from an overdose of prescription drugs and alcohol. Newman, the film's director, co-producer and co-writer wanted Gene Hackman to play the lead role. However, the studio insisted that Newman also star as the father. Robbie Benson is fine as Newman's distant son. I was in Fort Lauderdale when Harry & Son was being filmed. It created some excitement when Paul Newman walked into a sandwich shop and ordered his takeout lunch.

The male response to "Terms of Endearment" fails badly at all levels as it's neither charming with its chaotic humor and neither fully satisfies as a drama. It breaks my heart to see Paul Newman being lead actor/director/writer of a piece so strange, trying to be too many things all at once and not delivering a single right note that makes us care for it. It's one of those cases that you may enjoy the performances (as he got a great ensemble with Ellen Barkin, Wilford Brimley, Judith Ivey, Ossie Davis, Morgan Freeman and Newman's wife Joanne Woodward), enjoy some of the situations but you won't feel relating with anybody and won't learn anything from it, as the mountain of cliches pile up with almost no reward.

The relationship between a sick father (Newman) and his young son (Robby Benson) is given an awkward treatment as they swing back and forth between good buddies to unknown figures to each other who bicker for pointless things, or at times because the idealist promising writer fails to sustain a work. I sort of related with the sensitive kid failing at all the works he applied since he's totally wrong for it, and only writing could help him to come out to life (but his writing sucks, the little it was shown).

Why "Harry and Son" is so weak and never fully works? Newman's character is too stubborn, deeply rooted in his own persona and only thinks about himself; and even when he gets a new chance at love, with the advances from a friend of his deceased wife, he becomes a rude figure. With his son, it gets wildly confusing as to what he really wants from the boy, reaching a point where he kicks him out of home just because his room was a mess, and if one looks back at their very first scene, having a dinner by candlelight and having a nice talk, they never were the kind of men who were against each others throat. As the father's disease is never mentioned (neither treated) I assume he has a brain tumor that makes him such an erratic man, who barely generates any sympathy from the audience.

But what irritated me the most was the bizarre balance of comedy and drama, as none of them are convincing or interesting. Take the famous dish breaking scene where the guys invite the sister/daughter and her husband to lunch and Newman presents his daughter with some fancy dishes from the family and makes a whole "prank" that the estimated dishes break, much to the woman's horror, and ours as well. It goes from slightly funny, to heavily dramatic as she leaves the house, moves back to funny as Newman falls on the same prank while cleaning everything, a chase ensues around the house and then moves to more drama as he feels sick. It's the kind of thing it'd work in literature, here it just try so hard in getting a rollercoaster of emotions that you don't know for whom to care or reject. The whole film goes in between too much drama, too much comedy and it hardly gets right at any of those.

For a higher analysis, "Harry and Son" proves that some people will never grow or they'll never have the ability to change; others will have changes forced upon themselves way before their times and all the learning must be done quickly. But I've seen better with such proof. As a personal project for Mr. Newman, this lacked coherence, passion and heart. Like his character, a demolition crane operator, he crashes everything down in what could be a good film. 5/10.