In reality his wife is Lili Taylor who played the character Joy in the film, they have a child together. So why at the end of the film is his wife revealed to be black and his kid mixed?
An obvious agenda being pushed?
stopchasingyourtail
I don't know the exact reason, but I doubt there's an agenda being pushed.
People sometimes fictionalize names and other details in their memoirs to protect the privacy of others. In this case everybody knows who Flynn was writing about, so that's kind of a quirky decision on his part.
I just didn't like that his wife and child came out of the blue at the end. There was no character development for them.
shareThe details of all that are in Flynn's second memoir, published several years after his first one. What the filmmakers did was take the material from that book and condense it down into a few moments of running time.
I'm just guessing, but maybe the point was to give a happier ending (Flynn himself becoming a father) to the somewhat ambiguous ending of the original book.
Yeah but it is not in the movie. Not everyone has read that book when they see the movie.
shareSure, but I guess Hollywood hasn't lost its emphasis on happy endings. As someone said, "The happy ending is our national belief."
Here the ending just happens to be true, even if the filmmakers didn't bother to explain how it came about.
I just wanted the ending to be more developed and not out of the blue.
shareIt wasn't exactly out of the blue. The filmmakers used narration to compress the time frame by several years, and so lots of what happened during that time is left for viewers to fill in. Plus, having the family presented without introduction mirrors for us the happy surprise that Jonathan got upon meeting them.
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.
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Perhaps it was DeNiro's preference. He has a preferance for blacks in real life.
sharemaybe it was just someone who wanted to be in it and they just happened to be black. crew, acquaintence, anyone, it's a tiny part. Putting Lili Taylor in the movie but avoiding her playing "Lili Taylor" is understandable IMO.
but Beaurogue711's take wouldn't surprise me either
What agenda? That's a weird thing to say.
Anyway, I think the last scene was to show how Nick turned out to be different from his father. He was a published writer and married to a woman who just so happened to be from the same ethnic group the older Flynn subjected his rants to.
What I was confused about was the look Nick gave to his father as he held his grandchild. I couldn't tell if it was disappointment, astonishment, wonder or something else.
I think what the OP meant is an agenda of political correctness. I think it's *beep* for them to do that if in real life Nick Flynn's wife is White. but what do you expect from Hollywood?
shareIt's a factionalized account of a true story. Unless every other actor looks exactly like the people they portrayed, I don't see anything wrong with their casting choice here either. His character married a woman and had a child. That's what the movie showed. Her race, the color of her hair, height, etc have no bearing on the story. I think maybe people are looking for something here that just doesn't exist.
And what exactly would the agenda be if there were one? To show that people are people and the various characteristics they contain don't change that? I don't think that has anything to do with political correctness. I think that's just a part of life.
Did he actually say the woman was his wife? And isn't it possible that in real life he had a relationship with a woman of color before marrying Lili Taylor?
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.
I don't know what the op and others meant by agenda, but it seemed to me that his wife was Black because his father was a racist and it was a way of showing how he didn't let his father's opinions guide his lifestyle and become some self fulfilling prophecy or something. And the fact that he finally introduced his family to his father showed that he was secure in himself now and maybe hopeful that he can change his father's opinion.
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Exactly what I was thinking, along with the additional possibility that the filmmakers did it to give the viewing audience an "uh oh, how's Jonathan going to react here?" moment.
As for the "agenda" comment, I think the OP was just being common and trying to stir things up. Either that or he/she really does believe there was an agenda behind it, ignorantly so.
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