Daddy & Them Miramax Home Entertainment

This delightful, beautifully observed 1999 (well, originally) comedy was an unfortunate victim in the nasty fallout between Billy Bob Thornton and Miramax over All The Pretty Horses.  Thornton had given them a four hour film with a score by Daniel Lanois that was promptly butchered down to two hours, with Lanois' music scrapped and Marty Stuart hired to rescore.  As clashes between visionary directors and willful studio heads go, this was one for the books. In retaliation for Thornton's badmouthing, as well as the critical and box office failure of Horses, Miramax sat for years on two other Billy Bob films that they had bankrolled. One, Waking Up In Reno, could have stayed in the vaults and no one would have been the worse for it, but it's a crying shame that Daddy & Them, one of the best American film comedies of the past ten years, was prevented from ever having a theatrical run.

Billy Bob Thornton and Laura Dern are Claude and Ruby, a married couple whose relationship appears to be forever teetering on the edge of disaster. Jealous to an insane degree over one another's past love lives, they can't seem to go five minutes without arguing over Ruby's "musclemen" or the fact that Claude not only once dated her older sister Rose (played memorably by Kelly Preston), but still flirts with her and allows his doddering father, played by Andy Griffith, to go on mistaking Rose for Ruby. 

Claude's dysfunctional family attempts to unite in the face of a crisis as Uncle Hazel (Jim Varney) has been charged with attempted murder. Claude's adult brothers, J.C. (Jeff Bailey) and Alvin (John Prine), both appear to live at home with their parents, O.T. and Elba (Sandra Seacat, who is heartbreakingly funny in an almost wordless performance), and where J.C. is something of a tomcat, Alvin is a man who prefers the company of books to that of his family.  Prine, a brilliant singer-songwriter, is an eccentric revelation as the melancholy bookworm. It's no surprise that his innate understanding of phrasing serves him well here as he makes every line of dialogue count to show something about his character, but what is extraordinary is how well he listens and reacts to the other actors in the film. If he should choose to act in another film he would be a welcome presence.  Prine also wrote the song "In Spite of Ourselves" for Daddy & Them and performs it as a duet with the great Iris Dement. One can't help but wonder if the film had been granted a proper release six years ago, if John Prine, cult folksinger, could have copped a well-deserved Oscar nomination for Best Song and perhaps substantially increased his fanbase because of it.

Daddy & Them is far more interested in its characters and how they behave rather than moving the plot along. Thornton also grounds the comedy with moments of very real drama and human interaction. This movie could have very easily have been a sloppy, condescending "let's make fun of the hicks!" broad farce, so it is to the credit of everyone involved that this is a real film that earns its laughs through artful playing while catching you off guard with its emotional depth.  A lot of credit for the latter goes to Laura Dern, one of the best actresses of her generation, who takes what could have been a shrill, one-note character and instead gives us a touching and sympathetic character who often behaves like a paranoid scold out of an aching vulnerability that she can't seem to express any other way. Thornton's Claude is a more comical character and his obsession with being a buff studmuffin provides the film with some of its biggest laughs outside of Griffith's O.T.

It's easy to forget what a fine actor Andy Griffith really is, and those who don't know or might have forgotten would do well to watch his performance here. O.T. is beginning to go senile and has nightmares about being chased and/or raped on an almost nightly basis.  He still sees himself as the family's prime mover although his capacity to function as patriarch is rapidly diminishing and you get the impression that he isn't exactly beloved by his children while his wife has been neglected to the point that her most meaningful relationship is with a toy monkey. Again, it would have been very easy for Griffith to fall into caricature, but he gives O.T. a basic sweetness and obliviousness that makes it impossible to hate him.

The film is studded with cameos from the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis, Ben Affleck, Diane Ladd and Brenda Blethyn, but the heart and soul of Daddy & Them is watching Thornton, Dern, Prine, Griffith, Seacat and Bailey give us one of the most convincing families rendered on film in quite some time. There is a lived-in quality to the way they interact that convinces you these people have spent years together and, outside of Claude and Rose's mercurial relationship, none of them have actually said anything to one another in many, many moons. Next time you're browsing through your local video store and you happen upon a copy, don't be put off by the cheap box cover or the fact that it went direct to video.  Do yourself a favor and check out this underrated gem that deserves better than the Miramax-sanctioned obscurity it has been relegated to.

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