Harry & Son

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.

Paul Newman plays Harry Keach , a father who has been widowed for two years , who works as a demolition crane operator . He loses his hub due to a medical condition and finds himself battling his son and other personal demons .

When you think of Paul Newman films you don't think of Harry & Son and for good reason . This overlong , melodramatic film , directed by Newman is definitely not his best work .

It's nearly two hours of nothing much which ends extremely abruptly . Almost as if they ran out of money!

It definitely has the feel of a TV movie but actually wasn't .

Newman , unsurprisingly is the best thing about this film along with his real life wife , Joanne Woodward , but I haven't addressed the elephant in the room yet and that's Robby Benson who plays Howard , the son.

What a terrible actor ! He prances around looking like a cheep John Travolta, in a pair of shorts that should be on a twelve year old boy , flashing his eyelashes and whispering every line as if he's trying to be Brando . The worst thing is he has a massive amount of screen time as well .

He really is appalling and it's no wonder I've never seen him In anything since.

It was interesting to see a young Morgan Freeman in a small cameo and Wilfred Brimley whois criminally underused.

Unless you are a massive Paul Newman fan ( and I am ) , then I wouldn't bother .

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.

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.

The narrative line of the script is scattered and seems to pick up ideas and problems and then drop them without resolution to tackle some other tangential issue. The issues all pertain to the relationship between the father and son but it would have been better to focus more on their interaction and less on exterior forces. Benson tries in the lead but just is not that strong of a screen presence especially when competing with Newman's star power. The rest of the cast is certainly talented even if what they are handed character wise is diffuse. It is interesting to see some like Freeman and Barkin who went on to long careers just starting out. Not a bad film but very average.