Movies Should Stop Letting Dads Off the Hook

If you went to the movies this fall, you probably met him: the Sad Art Dad. You’ll have known him by his miserableness; despite the flash of the cameras and the cheers of the groundlings, he’s most often found moping alone. His vocation may vary—movie star (in Jay Kelly), art-house director (Sentimental Value), blockbuster Tudor playwright (Hamnet)—but his problem tends to be the same. He has chosen great art over good parenting, utterly failing as a father, and he knows it. There’s something delicious about his cocktail of self-pity and self-loathing, which can arouse both the viewer’s repulsion and compassion. It may not be much fun to be a Sad Art Dad, but it’s certainly fun to watch one.

The distant and distracted patriarch, although abundant on-screen in 2025, is not a novel invention. Yet most movie dads are more likely to be found balancing stellar careers and model parenting (lawyer-dad in To Kill A Mockingbird; Mob-dad in the Godfather films) than exhibiting—let alone acknowledging—their fatherly flaws. Sometimes prioritizing professional ambitions is even depicted as admirable: In Interstellar, Matthew McConaughey plays an astronaut who abandons his kids for a decades-long space mission, but only in order to save humanity. The character might beat himself up for it, but the viewer understands that it’s a pretty good excuse, as far as they go.

What’s different about this new cinematic crop of dads is their culpability. They each choose themselves over their kids, prioritizing creative fulfillment. George Clooney’s titular A-lister in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly admits as much when trying to explain his years-long absence to his now-adult daughter: “I wanted something very badly,” he says, “and I thought if I took my eye off of it, I couldn’t have it.” At least Jay is trying to apologize. When Gustav (played by Stellan Skarsgård), the ornery patriarch of Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, is accused by his daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve) of never having watched her perform, he defends himself by saying that he doesn’t like theater. Meanwhile, in Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) likes the theater a bit too much. Although he’s a much more affectionate parent than Jay or Gustav, the Bard’s absence—he gallops away from plaguey Stratford-upon-Avon to the Elizabethan West End—has calamitous consequences for his kids.

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But these films are not pat condemnations of the flawed fathers they depict; they illustrate, sometimes with seeming ambivalence, the consequences of such self-absorption. Tellingly, Sentimental Value’s most tender scene doesn’t feature Gustav at all. Instead, it’s a quiet moment between Nora and her sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). Having finally read Gustav’s latest screenplay, and found within it surprising echoes of the darkest periods of her own life, an emotional Nora sits on her bedroom floor beside her sister. The script is so uncannily accurate, Agnes notes, that it’s as though their father had been there for Nora’s suffering. “Well, he wasn’t,” Nora replies. “You were.”

It’s a gorgeous demonstration of familial love that also lays bare the true cost of the Sad Art Dad’s narcissism. He has made himself redundant; his children have learned, painfully, to cope without him. The same specter of redundancy haunts both Hamnet and Jay Kelly. When Shakespeare arrives home after tragedy strikes, he finds that he’s too late to help his family. He then announces his intent to return to London—and his wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), slaps him. Jay’s daughter Jess (Riley Keough) tells her father with brutal candor not to worry about her: “I’m gonna have a good life, just not with you.” A memorable shot in Sentimental Value shows Gustav standing alone on a Normandy beach, his hulking, black-suited figure marooned against miles of sand and scudding lilac clouds. The price of failed fatherhood, it seems, is loneliness.

Does the Sad Art Dad regret his choices? Is making great art—which, in these films, has a capacious, allegorical quality—worth ruining your relationship with your kids? Each of these movies tries to convince us, with varying degrees of success, that prioritizing your artistic endeavors offers emotional compensation. Hamnet, for instance, ends with a delicately choreographed moment of parental connection. Agnes, standing in the audience at the Globe Theatre, reaches out to grasp the hand of the young actor playing Hamlet; in the film’s version of the play, the tragic boy-hero is named for her dead son. Moving though it is, the scene’s mawkishness renders it unpersuasive: Agnes’s abrupt pivot from bitterly resenting her husband to forgiving him strains credulity. A play, even a Shakespeare play, is no substitute for a child.

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Jay Kelly also considers the case for putting your craft before your kids, but only half-heartedly. It toys with the idea that the magic of the movies at least partially justifies Jay’s parental negligence; the film ends on a long close-up of Jay’s face as he watches a retrospective reel of his career, visibly moved. But the film ultimately gives up trying to convince the audience that the art was worth the human cost. In its closing line, Jay asks, fruitlessly, for a chance to live his life over again. Measured against the wreckage of his relationships, Hollywood’s comforts prove chilly even to the movie star.

Sentimental Value’s vision of film as a doorway to empathy and repair is by far the most compelling. Gustav’s script may dwindle beside the compassion his daughters offer each other, yet his transformation of Nora’s pain into art is still an act of love. As Agnes says to her sister: “I think he wrote it for you.” Gustav’s work, we realize, is more empathetic, more attentive to other people, than he is. His daughters might find this to be a bitter-tasting irony, but the consolation is real—particularly for an actor like Nora, who eventually finds creative catharsis playing the part Gustav based on her.

Oddly, despite his inadequacies, the Sad Art Dad suggests a promising cultural shift on-screen. To pay attention to the idea of flawed fatherhood, after all, is to think seriously about what constitutes its opposite, the good dad. Laura Dern’s unsentimental divorce lawyer says it well in Baumbach’s Marriage Story, which is also about depressed dads: “The idea of a good father was only invented, like, 30 years ago.” As such, it’s striking to find three films out at the same time that are gnawed by such similar anxieties. Perhaps Joachim Trier put it best: “Tenderness is the new punk.”