Hollywood taps into parental guilt, anxiety

By Rebecca Keegan

Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES

Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly fight over how it ought to be done in “Carnage.” George Clooney in “The Descendants,” Matt Damon in “We Bought a Zoo” and Sandra Bullock in “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” are worried about doing it alone. Viola Davis does it for other people in “The Help.” Demian Bichir does it as an immigrant in “A Better Life.” Nick Nolte is trying to do it over sober in “Warrior.” And Tilda Swinton has blood-soaked proof that she has done it all terribly wrong in “We Need to Talk About Kevin.”

Parenting — specifically parental guilt and anxiety — is the subtext of a surprisingly large number of the year-end and awards-season movies.

Reflecting and sometimes commenting on a culture of self-conscious child-rearing, many recent films show moms and dads who seem far removed from the assuredness of their cinematic forebears. Imagine if Atticus Finch in the 1962 film “To Kill A Mockingbird” had read daddy blogs, or if the bickering couples in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966) landed their best zingers about playground etiquette.

“Societally, parenting is shifting, and that’s being reflected in the movies,” said Dr. Alexandra Barzvi, clinical assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine and host of the Sirius radio show “About Our Kids.” “In the past, people parented based on instincts and how they were raised, but now with technology and the ease of transmittable information, we know so much more about parenting. We do so much more thinking about parenting. You can’t turn on a morning show without an expert talking about how to keep your kids busier. ... Everyone wants to know how everyone else is doing it.”

“It’s a scary time to be a parent,” said Reilly, a real-life father of two who plays an ineffectual dad in two new films — one oblivious to his son’s dangerous detachment in “We Need to Talk About Kevin” and another arguing with his wife and another couple about how to resolve their sons’ playground fight in “Carnage.”

“People are freaking out — What’s happening to my quality of life? I have no time to spend with my kids, I can’t take care of my kids, I don’t have healthcare for my kids. ... ‘Kevin’ might be a horror story for parents, and ‘Carnage’ a horror story about parents.”

“Carnage” sends up the hyper-involved culture of well-to-do parents, as two couples devolve into children themselves while debating their sons’ spat.