Parenthood: A Humanistic Close Reading

Abstract

Part IV looks at a film text often described as “humanistic” using the analytical methods established throughout the book. This chapter describes how Parenthood’s particular domestic realism offered a precursor to later suburban ensemble pictures, before breaking down the politics, ethics and psychology of the film. The latter half of the chapter goes into more detail on the narrative’s modelling of familial psychology, but also the way the film form itself represents many of its key concerns: Parenthood’s structure provokes the very confounding emotional causality across extended networks that the film speaks to.