The family comedy has always been a staple of the Hollywood summer calendar, with early-summer blockbusters acting as cultural bellwethers. They are the movies that define eras, like The Goonies and Big in the ’80s. Yet for every E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, there is a Mac and Me — it’s a beloved genre that elicits plenty of nostalgia, but there are more bad entries than good. As much as we may want to love a lighthearted family comedy with local ties and a likable lead, Old Hickory native Nate Bargatze’s The Breadwinner is one of the genre’s more forgettable recent entries.
Nate Wilcox (Bargatze) is a successful Toyota salesman and his household’s sole breadwinner, supporting his stay-at-home wife Katie (Mandy Moore) and their three daughters. Katie takes an invention onto the show Shark Tank, where she is given a conditional offer — she’ll get financing for her project, but only if Nate takes time off from work to be a stay-at-home dad. The catch: Nate is completely and utterly incompetent at anything and everything other than selling cars. He has to survive being a single parent for two weeks while Katie develops her business.
As one might gather from the premise alone, this is a film that feels outdated on arrival. The idea that a nuclear family still needs a stay-at-home parent is one that feels unreflective of the times. Most American households are now dual-income, and most two-parent households see both adults working full time and still providing childcare. The insistence from The Breadwinner’s characters that there needs to be one stay-at-home parent indirectly demonizes parents who want to work. Seeing a car salesman providing for a family of five in a large, two-story house in the suburbs — with the main conflict stemming from his wife receiving equity investment to start a business — is out of touch with modern reality. At times it feels almost insulting. The incompetent-dad trope — centering on a man who is completely unable to take care of himself and relies on his wife to do everything — is sadder than it is funny. It attempts to center on the difficulty faced by stay-at-home moms, but also leans on tired gender roles by depicting the film’s only other stay-at-home dad as hyper effeminate.
The Breadwinner is also laden with product placements — and the Toyota placements feel particularly egregious. Nate’s die-hard Tennessee Titan fandom functions as a major MacGuffin in the film’s plot, leading to awkward clashes between Nissan Stadium’s signage and the film’s frequent Toyota mentions. An ex machina Walmart-centric portion of the film breaks any semblance of cinematic immersion, feeling more like a commercial break or an unskippable ad.
The Breadwinner is a Nashville-set family comedy that probably doesn’t feature enough Nashville in it to gain a local cult following, but it’s also not the sort of trainwreck that can provide ironic entertainment. It relies on outdated ideas of gender roles in a nuclear family — gender roles that are fading from memory more and more by the year. It attempts to evoke nostalgia from previous decades, but you can’t define a generation if you’re stuck in the previous one.
