Post-Father's Day feature 2: Unforgettable fathers and sons on screen and stage

MANILA, Philippines - According to therapist and educator Michael Gurian, frequent guest resource person on TV and radio programs including the Today show, birthright is our psycho-spiritual container of memories, ancestral legends, family stories, genetic material and social status, which generation upon generation of our families and ethnic groups have passed onto us. Destiny, as common sense tells us, is a predetermined course of events considered as something beyond human power or control.

These twin concepts underlie the timeless beauty of Walt Disney’s sixth grossing animated film, The Lion King (1994), in which Mufasa, the noble king, tells his son Simba of his sacred mission: “All that you see is in the great circle of life. One day you will be its king. One day you will be responsible for that circle.” Echoing the Biblical story of Joseph and Moses and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the son’s birthright to rule is entwined with his destiny to be accountable to his herd.

On screen and stage, we remember the great fathers who allow their sons to become their own persons, yet still remain a good role model; who trust them to live a vision they themselves have pondered through and affirmed from a position of strength and spiritual maturity, so that their sons can find for themselves the high road to manhood.

In the shortlived CBS television series The Guardian, corporate lawyer Burton Fallin (Dabney Coleman) and his son Nick (Simon Baker, the star of Warner Brother’s The Mentalist) are locked in a typical father-son philosophy that serves the American culture of individualism. The son is emotionally wounded by the death of his mother, falls into the wrong company and gets convicted in the courts because of drugs, but with unconditional love, the father is able to teach his boy justice tempered by mercy, so he is able to fulfill his sentence of 1,500 hours community service as legal guardian to minors who are lost in the big bad world. Towards its last season, Nick is seen clutching a woman who o.d’d in his apartment, while trying to contact the only person who will not judge him harshly — his dad. Why this series lasted as long as it did (Sept. 2001 to May 2004) owed to this tender bond between father and son, and why it had to go, despite awards like the 2002 Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actor in a Drama Series, behooves many.

In the 2002 Great Depression period drama movie The Road to Perdition, directed by Sam Mendes (adapted from the graphic novel of the same title), mob enforcer, Michael Sullivan Sr. (Tom Hanks) had a surrogate father, Irish mafia boss John Rooney (Paul Newman) who was cursed with having a biological son who was a disgrace to his name, yet whom he needed to protect because of sheer blood ties, to the peril of Michael Sr.’s own family. Left with the eldest son, who at first thought his father preferred his younger brother Peter over him, Michael Sr. makes the ultimate sacrifice (his own life) so his son can be freed from the life he chose, which leads to only one course — perdition of his soul. By dying in the hands of a hired cold blooded psychopath assassin (Jude Law), Michael Sr. redeems the life of Michael Jr., who went on to assume another identity in an obscure farm. The closing scene of the movie, which typified the muted palette of the Super 35 format which won for the film the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, resonates with a son’s loyal love for a father whose life was far from perfect, yet he adored from a point of inaccessibility: “When people ask me if Michael Sullivan was a good man, or if there was just no good in him at all, I always give the same answer. I just tell them... he was my father.”

Another poignant surrogate father and son relationship is featured in the 2000 box-office historical epic directed by Ridley Scott, The Gladiator, which won Best Picture in the 73rd Academy Awards. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) loved the heroic Spaniard commander of the armies of the North, Maximus Decimus Meridius (Russel Crowe), to the shame and envy of his real son, the evil Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). Stinging from the insult that his father chose Maximus to rule after him, he cries: “One kind word, one full hug while you pressed me to your chest and held me tight, would have been like the sun on my heart for a thousand years. What is it in me you hate so much? All I ever wanted was to live up to you, Caesar, Father. Father, I would butcher the whole world if you would only love me!” Before he was treacherously slain by his mad odious son, the Emperor consoles him:“Your fault as a son is my failure as a father.”

Legends of the Fall, directed by Edward Zwick in 1994 (adapted from the 1979 novella of the same title by Jim Harrison) tells the World War I Prohibition era story of Col. William Ludlow (Anthony Hopkins) and his three sons (Aidan Quinn), Tristan (Brad Pitt) and Samuel (Henry Thomas), who retreated in the Montana prairies to lead a quiet life until troubled by the enchanting beauty of one woman Susannah (Julia Ormond). The father adamantly held on to principled eccentricities scathed by too much bloodshed and betrayal in a land co-opted by the white man with utter disregard for the native Indians, which his sons could not understand. But after the death of the youngest son in a war in Europe, the three remaining members of the Ludlow bloodline unite to stave off the tyranny of a detested common enemy: abuse of power. Before immolating herself, Isabel looks with loving eyes on Tristan’s boy, saying: “His father’s name, Ludlow, has great value. Inherent in it is along lineage of honor, responsibility, compassion, wisdom.” The Ludlow men’s saga tells us: It is only fitting that every son would want to live up to his father’s name so that his father would say of him, “I am proud of you.”

In one of the longest running television sitcoms from CBS (1996 to 2005), Phil Rosenthal’s Everybody Loves Raymund, there is the hilarious triumvirate of the Barones from Long Island, New York: father Frank (Peter Boyle) and his two sons, the policeman Robert (Brad Garrett) and the sports columnist Raymund (Ray Romano), perpetually sticking each other’s American-Italian noses in each other’s affairs, all in the spirit of their convoluted love for one another.

Running at the Raja Sulayman Theater in 1979, Lino Brocka’s Mga Ama Mga Anak  (a PETA adaptation of Nick Joaquin’s Fathers and Sons), touches on the difficult understanding of the code of integrity, honesty, honor, responsibility and soul care that form the core of the Filipinos’ ethos. The dying wanton of a father, the Older Zacarias Monson (Ruben Rustia) was at the receiving end of the chastising hands of his son, Celo (Butch Aquino), which the third generation Monson, the ex seminarian Chitong, found cruel and unrelenting. Braving the wrath of his own father, he steals into his grandfather’s deathbed his latest agogo dancer querida (Hilda Koronel) so the old man can die in peace.

We honor all the males in our planet, who sanctify their noble roles in life: providers, protectors and nurturers of children. This is the holy covenant imprinted in the DNA of all men who answer to the endearment of daddy, papa, papi, abba, ba, vatter, tatay, ama — who actively participate in the center of three concentric circles: his immediate family, his extended family (including nonblood kin, as god parent, family friend and neighbor) and his community (as a mentor, minister, and counselor).

Onscreen, stage or real life, we celebrate all fathers, who, in the prayer composed by Douglas MacArthur for his son, leads their children not in the path of ease and comfort, but under the stress and spur of difficulties and challenge…to learn to stand up in the storm…to learn compassion for those who fail.