Fridae

I believe it was Karl Marx who said that all great history and historical figures repeat themselves, first time as grand tragedy, the second as a rotten farce. We could take this principle and apply it to our understanding of Parental Guidance, which re-enacts the fine drama of Trouble with the Curve as a broad comedy.

Billy Crystal's Artie is sort of the Clint Eastwood figure here, an old school sports announcer who's great at his job, eats and breathes baseball, but is terrible at keeping up with the times and new technologies. When the film begins, he loses his job in the first five minutes. There is some sort of family angst going on between Artie and his daughter (played by Marisa Tomei), caused no doubt by her extreme embarrassment and discomfort of her laissez-faire upbringing by Artie and his wife Diane (Bette Midler). You get the sense that she got married just so to get her parents out of her life forever, and to raise her children in exactly the opposite manner, and is ruining their childhoods in the process. Except since this is a farcical family comedy, fate will have her inviting her monstrously déclassé parents over to look after the kids for the weekend.

If Trouble with the Curve reacted against technology, paradigm change, the generational divide, and mavericks changing the rules of the game by constructing an elegiac cinematic film, Parental Guidance addresses the same issues by dumbing them down and blowing them up to exaggerated proportions in a comical farce consisting of several sketches strung together. Quite unfortunately, the film's obvious humour and resort to low-brow physical comedy seems to suggest that after a 10-year absence from film, Billy Crystal is no longer in his prime.

That's not to say that Parental Guidance is a slight, forgettable film. In the middle of all the predictable laughs, the film is as honest a celebration of baseball and Americana as Trouble with the Curve.