Directed By Eric Appel

Starring – Nate Bargatze, Mandy Moore, Colin Jost

The Plot – Stars Bargatze as salesman Nate Wilcox, and Mandy Moore as his wife, Katie. To Nate and their three children, Katie is the ultimate mom – she manages their comically chaotic household with equal parts efficiency and love, and everything runs perfectly. But when Katie’s household invention leads to a once-in-a-lifetime deal on Shark Tank and takes her on a prolonged business trip, Nate has to figure out how to keep the house from (literally) falling apart. He and his kids soon learn that while he may not do it like mom, he can figure out how to do it his way. Welcome to the dad era.

Rated PG for some mildly suggestive references

THE BREADWINNER – Official Trailer (HD)

POSITIVES

Though there’s an unmistakably stale derivativity to The Breadwinner’s established material that makes it feel interchangeable with any role reversal family comedy over the past twenty years, the film still serves as an emphatically intentioned showcase for Nate Bargatze, whose charming personality and blue collar ideals make him an ideally vulnerable candidate for unforeseen family difficulties, resulting in a few legitimately effective gags that keep the experience engaging despite its evidential flaws. Being that the material was crafted from exclusively from Bargatze’s own stand-up comedy gags, he knows exactly the kind of agonizingly dry deadpan responses and poker face obscurity that not only keeps the realities of these conflicts unregistered in his every man simplicity, but also allows for elevation in the predictability of the material that does surprise with Bargatze’s sharply penetrating comedic timing, and while Bargatze is far from the first comedian to seamlessly make the transition into movie star, there’s an authenticity to his internalized responses that seamlessly blur the line between fantasy and reality within his captivity, in turn cementing the perfect opportunity for him to get his feet wet among the kinds of mainstream built-in audiences who will undoubtedly arrive in droves to see a comedian that has given them laughter to the tedium of everyday realities. Bargatze also doesn’t have to do the heavy lifting alone, as the supporting cast is full of some pleasant surprises from Saturday Night Live alumni that arrive spontaneously to steal a scene or two along the way, delivering on these eccentrically exaggerated personalities that certainly appraise a new side of their expressive capabilities, even amidst glorified cameos that could certainly fall by the wayside of feeling thankless within the film’s bigger picture. Beyond the cast, while the comedic material does struggle more times than not with effectively manufacturing an impulse from an interpreting audience, I did appreciate that it doesn’t feel constrained by its PG articulated sensibilities, especially considering family comedies typically reach for the kind of sweetly saccharine tangibles in execution that make the interactions feel so artificially phony. The single biggest example of this is how Bargatze and co-writer Dan Lagana revel in the awkwardness of family ideals, in ways that are exaggerated to wield laughter, yet relatable enough to feel familiar to those surrounded by it, and considering Bargatze is forced to act opposite of impressionable youths for an overwhelming majority of the experience, there’s an unforeseen underlining edginess to the periodic pay-offs that not only kept me invested to the interjecting dynamics, but also kept this from feeling like a movie made entirely for the youths in the audience, instead garnering an adaptable experience that should appeal to all demographics of an expansive audience. Lastly, the film is far from a big budgeted blockbuster, but it does utilize a necessary abundance of its 25 million dollar budget to transform this established household before our very eyes, in turn supplanting stakes to an upper class family capable of fixing any surmising problem. When the movie begins, the setting feels warm and cozy in the confines of its lavishly elegant designs, serving as a means of articulating Katie’s blossoming influence to the family’s prominence, but as the film persists under Nate’s command, there’s an increasingly growing sense of instability and even deterioration that candidly conveys how two weeks can compromise the stoic foundation of this family’s peaceful sanctuary, with the setting looking unidentifiable by film’s end, despite us spending so much time within its once humble surroundings.

NEGATIVES

Appel’s film undeniably has its charms in the undeterred energy that Bargatze delivers towards conjuring some semblance of memorability to the engagement, but even their Herculean efforts are deterred by an outdatedly stumbling script that makes some very detrimental choices to its lasting appeal, such as the lack of depth or dimensions with its centralized characters, who feel like types instead of grounded people. While the roles of this family feel predictably evident long before the movie begins, it’s painfully realized in such thinly written outlines that fail to grasp us a deeper sense of understanding in their corresponding development, particularly Katie, who much of the movie’s moral lesson and familial value hinges on, yet never a character whom we spend necessary time alone away from Nate, in order to value how her psychology changes in being away from her family for such a prolonged allowance of time. Because it doesn’t value her as an explorational character, the movie’s stance to value her influence in ways that determine this family’s fate, feels slightly hypocritical and underutilized in its executive action, in turn wasting away a performance from Mandy Moore, which could’ve humbled this movie with the necessary heart to keep it from feeling so frequently juvenile. As previously indicated, the script’s comedic material definitely elicits a few scattered laughs that keep things entertaining, but in terms of consistency there simply isn’t enough creative deviation to capitalize on its bountiful potential, instead opting for the weakest in bodily humor and gross-out gags that feel outdated by 2005 standards, and considering the effectiveness of the humor becomes less frequent, the longer the film persists into its second hour, the alienating of atmosphere weighs heavily on the movie’s corresponding pacing, making the third act of the movie feel unbearably prolonged in the structure of its sequencing, for a movie that barely clocks in at a meager 90-minute runtime. In terms of creative outlining, the conveniences of these set-ups certainly require audiences to believe that Nate is this bumbling buffoon who is incapable of even making breakfast for his children, but somehow this master car salesman who dominates in sales and courtesy, in order to justify him losing control in the most simplistic situations, but even in the ways the film capitalizes on these overwhelming circumstances, it enacts the most artificially hollow and cartoonish brand of slapstick humor that mechanically eviscerates the subtleties and psychology of Bargatze’s interactively awkward brand of humbled humor, with special effects that don’t even come close to attaining the necessary believability in gravity that doesn’t require as much technique to obscure what’s transpiring glaringly before our very eyes. Stepping off of the script, the film’s presentational elements also detract significantly from the film sinking down to the lowest level of commercialism to contort its family ideal, with the randomizing of the soundtrack, and the shameless product placement finding its way to the influence of the engagement, in the most obvious ways imaginable. On the former, the film commits the contemporary sin that opts for songs that doesn’t lyrically or musically line up with what’s being conjured atmospherically on-screen, with the worst of them serving as a tongue in cheek nod to the audience involving Mandy Moore’s late-90’s pop song “Candy”, and the latter, in the most unapologetically upfront and obvious ways conceivable, elicits these concentration-deviating sequences that quite literally feel like commercials for the intended products, such as Nate chowing down on a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Nate’s Toyota dealership constantly zeroing in on the automobile emblem that adorns his work shirt, and of course one of the movie’s three music montages, involving a family field trip to Wal-Mart, in order to find stability once more. If committed once, twice, or swiftly enough, the materialistic indulgence can easily be forgiven, but considering it remains a prominent consistency among the movie’s extent, it leaves the movie feeling shallow and distracting in incremental doses, leaving me thinking that the film served as an opportunistic tax write-off for its studio, as long as they abided by the rules of commercial artistry.

OVERALL
The Breadwinner is an outdated role reversal concept to a half-baked execution, that marries inconsistently juvenile humor with one-dimensional characterization, in ways so soullessly shilling and shamelessly commercialized to wipe any semblance of underlining emotionality from its prosperous foundation. While Nate Bargatze’s stand-up bits are brought to life with the comedian-turned-actor enacting the dryly deadpan deliveries of his celebrated stage show, the film surrounding his commendable efforts is every bit predictably telegraphed as it is illogically manufactured, enacting sitcom sensibilities to a lifelessly slapstick comedy that fails to bring home the bacon

My Grade: 4.2 or D-