By Dustin Rowles | Film | February 3, 2025 |
There’s a moment in Steve Martin’s Father of the Bride 2 — yes, I’m referencing a mediocre 30-year-old sequel — that gets me every time. He’s in a hospital hallway, holding both his wife’s and his daughter’s newborn babies in his arms, when he says, “It was at that moment, with my daughter in one arm and my grandson in the other, that I realized life isn’t going to get much better than this.” The whole last five minutes of that movie reaches in and squeezes my heart until the tears pour out of me. I don’t really understand why, but it feels like the emotional equivalent, to those who love Hallmark movies, of a woman returning to her small town from the big city and falling in love with a Christmas tree farmer.
It feels like a “girl dad” thing, a term I only heard for the first time maybe six months ago. When I looked it up, however, I saw it’s been around for years — considered cringe by some and even offensive by others, since “boy mom” is often used pejoratively while “girl dad” is seen as cute. I don’t know what to say to that, and I certainly don’t want to be thought of as a “girl dad,” but moments in movies and TV shows designed to resonate with fathers of daughters sure have a way of knocking me on my ass, emotionally speaking.
In any case, it did not surprise me that Hallie Meyers-Shyer — the daughter of Father of the Bride screenwriter Nancy Meyers — wrote and directed Michael Keaton’s latest, Goodrich, which premiered straight to Max this month (she also played seven-year-old Annie Banks in Father of the Bride 2). There is a moment at the end of Goodrich that not only evokes that Father of the Bride scene but likewise left me emotionally reeling.
It’s clear, too, that Goodrich is probably based on Hallie Meyers-Shyer’s relationship with her father, Charles Shyer, who directed the Father of the Bride movies. After Shyer and Nancy Meyers divorced, he remarried and had twins.
Goodrich follows an art gallery owner, Andy (Michael Keaton), whose much younger second wife (Laura Benanti) checks herself into rehab, leaving him to care for their twins. But this isn’t exactly a movie about a workaholic forced to balance his work/life responsibilities — he’s actually a very good father to the twins (Jacob Kopera and Vivien Lyra Blair). Instead, it’s about Andy trying to connect with his much older daughter from his first marriage, Grace (Mila Kunis), who is pregnant.
Grace’s relationship with her father is complicated: She loves him tremendously but also resents him because he’s the father to her younger half-siblings in a way he could never be for her. Grace is almost certainly based on Hallie Meyers-Shyer herself, who wrote the screenplay two years after having her son. Also, the guy she cast to play Grace’s husband looks just like her own husband, which is frankly a little much!
The point is: It’s a dramedy — Shrinking’s Michael Urie, who essentially plays Andy’s gay best friend, carries most of the comedy — and it feels rooted in something real. And it clearly is. It’s basically a movie about what happens to the relationship between the Father and the Bride after the Father remarries and has twins. (For the record, if the movie really is loosely biographical, Andie MacDowell plays Nancy Meyers, which feels right.)
Keaton is absolutely terrific here, and I always forget — unless I’m watching him — just what a phenomenal actor he can be. Watching him throughout the movie, I couldn’t help but think that Vince Vaughn’s rat-a-tat-tat owes a lot to Keaton, who can shift from a fast-talking salesman to a tender, loving dad with a gleam in his eye on a dime. After Grace has her baby, the way Keaton looks at her brought back all those Father of the Bride 2 feelings, which is bizarre considering I had no idea until the credits rolled that Hallie Meyers-Shyer wrote and directed this movie — only her second feature (after Reese Witherspoon’s Home Again).
And look, it’s not just a movie that might resonate with fathers of daughters and all the Matt Damons of the world; it’s just as likely to hit home with anyone who has had a complicated relationship with their parents. It’s meaningful in the way it reminds us that parents have lives outside of their relationship with their children, but also, those children have relationships outside of their lives with their parents. Still, that parent-child bond has a special kind of hold that often shapes who we are and how we interact with the world. Goodrich understands that, and I also like to believe it tells us a lot about what was going on behind the scenes of those Father of the Bride movies. I’m so sorry you lost your father two months ago, Hallie, but I hope that he became the available father you always wanted him to be in the last years of his life.
Goodrich is streaming on Max.