From parents struggling with the guilt of failing to care for their children to those who failed to recognize their parenthood, at least six of the 10 films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar reflect on family, one of the most important values in American society.
The selection of films in the most important section of the 98th edition of the Academy Awards, which will be held this Sunday, has shown a harmony among most of the authors to deal with conflicts very close to the public, especially in the U.S., where more than eight out of ten people agree that family is the most important value.
That’s Paul Thomas Anderson’s bet with ‘One Battle After Another’, which bases its plot on the life of Bob Ferguson, a troubled revolutionary played by Leonardo DiCaprio who struggles to protect his teenage daughter, Willa Ferguson, played by Chase Infiniti, while negotiating his guilt over his work as a father.
The director has described the film as “an exploration” of family, fatherhood and a single father’s struggle to give his all for his daughter.
Anderson completes his bid to dive into the complexity of families with the film’s villain, Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, played by Sean Penn, who turns out to be Willa’s biological father and seeks to get rid of her because she represents a stain on his life.
Another nominee for best film that reflects on family is ‘Hamnet’ by director Chloé Zhao.
Although the Oscar winner places the weight of the film on the shoulders of William Shakespeare’s wife Agnes, a herbalist and expert in medicinal potions who is unable to save her son from the plague, the story also explores the writer’s grief over the loss and how it inspired him to write one of his most important works.
The film portrays the married life of Agnes (Jessie Buckley) and William (Paul Mescal), marked by the father’s long absences to make a place for himself as a writer in London, where he finds himself when his son dies.
A similar pain is experienced by Robert Grainer, in ‘Train Dreams’, who loses his wife and young daughter in a forest fire while he is working on the construction of a railway line.
Director Clint Bentley’s film focuses on Grainer’s (Joel Edgerton) dilemma of having to leave his family while he works away and the guilt of not being able to protect them, in a film that takes a small glimpse into the history of the American West.
The 10 nominees for Best Picture at the Oscars stand out for their strong, topical themes
No less important is Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s reflection with his film ‘Sentimental Value’, which follows Gustav Borg, a famous film director who was absent in the lives of his two daughters and now returns to the center of the family after the death of his ex-wife.
The film starring Stellan Skarsgård delves into the complexities of forgiveness and reconciliation following Borg’s offer to one of his daughters to star in a film based on his painful family history.
Also touching on the theme of family, but from another perspective, is ‘O Agente Secreto’, by Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, about a father (Wagner Moura) who struggles to reunite with his son and escape the country while being pursued by the repressive machinery of the State.
Moura himself will give life to his son as an adult remembering his father, in a proposal that deals with family memory.
In this sense, Guillermo del Toro’s version of ‘Frankenstein’ reimagines the family as a nucleus marked by generational trauma, paternal abandonment and the son’s rebelliousness.
The Mexican director places on the character of Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) the duality of bearing the burden of his father’s mistreatment and the responsibility of his son (Jacob Elordi), a creature portrayed as a sensitive and abandoned being in search of love.
The other four films that complete the list of the most important section of the Oscars – ‘Sinners’, ‘Bugonia’, ‘F1’, and ‘Marty Supreme’ – also have touches on family relationships in their plots, reported Agencia EFE.
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