A Typical, Terrible Family

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

PARENTHOOD Directed by Ron Howard *

Screenplay by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel

Life, alas, is not a football game. It does not provide a goal line we can cross with cheers ringing in our ears, an end zone where we can spike the ball and do a victory dance. What it provides, in dizzying abundance, is one damned thing after another. This vividly expressed thought comes to us courtesy of Parenthood's Jason Robards, who plays Frank, the grandpaterfamilias of a clan he has considerable reason to wish he had not extended quite so extensively back when he was young and frisky.

It's not that the family's troubles are so terrible; it is that they are so terribly typical. Eldest son Gil (Steve Martin) is a perfectionist who wants to be the ideal husband, father, provider and Little League manager that Frank never was. Gil's wise and patient wife (Mary Steenburgen) can deal with the pressure his anxious idealism generates, but his eight-year-old son cannot. The boy's school is insisting that special education is his only hope. His ball team is down on him because he keeps muffing easy pop-ups. Which, of course, makes Gil try even more unnervingly to be Superdad.

Still, Gil's household is a sea of tranquillity compared with those of his siblings. One sister is single-parenting a potential juvenile delinquent. Another is married to a character played by this summer's one-man nerd fest, Rick Moranis (Ghostbusters II and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids), who has their two-year-old memorizing square roots and reading Kafka. Then there's a brother, who drifts back home looking for a new way to get rich without working, help with his gambling debts and a place to park his illegitimate child, whose name is Cool, whose skin is black and whose mother is about to do a jail term. Didn't Tolstoy say that each unhappy family is funny in its own way?

There is something brave and original about piling up most of our worst parental nightmares in one movie and then daring to make a midsummer comedy out of them. It really shouldn't work, but it does. The movie does not linger too long over any moment or mood, and it permits characters to transcend type, offering a more surprising range of response to events. Martin, for example, gets to do distraction as well as obsession, and Robards is allowed sentiment as well as cynicism. Because Ron Howard, who was responsible for Cocoon, has a talent for ensemble hubbub, there may be more good, solid performances in this unlikely context than in any other movie this year.

Maybe Parenthood should have toughed out more of its stories or left a couple of them dangling ambiguously. And the baby boomlet at the end, to which all branches of the family contribute, may strike viewers as a little too resounding a triumph of hope over experience. It can be argued, however, that a picture that confronts the ordinary bedevilments of middle-class life as honorably as this one does has earned the right to a little happiness. Besides, it's always better to change a diaper than to curse the darkness.