It really did lack a...

***SPOILERS***



Yeah I know what you mean, but their relationship was really interesting. The father was in prison for some time, but wrote him a lot of letters. And after they finally meet the way he talks to him is so infuriating =)

But it's beautiful how they "get" each other on some level, his father understands what he means and has some good "answers". I think they both know what's done is done and it is a waste of time to yell at each other.

At some point they talk about the suicide letter and he tells him that she hated herself. If you hate yourself, you cannot love yourself or anybody for that matter. Maybe that was the reason he or she couldn't be together. She had a lot of lovers and seemed to have relationship problems ("Normal" people have it in their nature and capabilities to make a relationship work, whatever the differences). Maybe his father couldn't be around because he loved his mother but knew it would never work. Of course thats no excuse for his father being "manifest as an absence".

The letters from his father also show some kind of projection of his fathers dream (being a great writer) onto his son. Nick is living his fathers dream. Nick's father is clearly narcissistic, but because he lacks the talent he wants he son "he made" to be the great writer. Luckily Nick is very good at it and it fulfills him, but it's still a sort of child abuse.

Maybe the absence of his father is also some way of "tempering" him. All great artists suffer, so if he had a happy childhood he can't become one. Of course that's total *beep* but also true on some fundamental level.
Or, if Nick would have known his father earlier, he would have been disappointed and also would not have tried so hard to aspire to become some sort of a writer. That could have been a subconscious motivation of his father to stay absent. A kind of emotional blackmail.

Nick being so perceptive makes me also think he developed this talent early in his childhood to care for the emotional needs of his mother. But that's only speculation.

What I wonder is if what his father says is truly autobiographic. Especially what his father says when he leaves his flat / bar (after he found him and took him in the first time), something like "you are not me. you are not your mother. I absolve you. I made you, but you are not me". It's just perfect, exactly what he needed to hear to get his life together. I wonder if his father really said it or if it is some kind of self therapeutic resolve he wrote for himself.

The film is brilliant, I think I got to read the book =)

Melodrama? You want melodrama? Watch Ball My Children or the Young and the Breastless.
Your ideas would have absolutely killed this film.

I agree, I really thought there would be a scene like that but it never came.

When there's no more room in hell, The dead will walk the earth...