I wonder if there are people out there that can relate to this character and what he said here for any reason? I can understand this guy and I wonder how prevalent it is and if it accounts for much of the problem between fathers and sons?
shareThis is one of the examples of clunky writing that I didn't like about this movie. This revelation comes out of nowhere in the final minutes of the movie. Before this his dad seemed to alternate between caring for his kid and wanting to keep him safe, and being generally annoyed with him. I never got the impression that he outright hated his kid.
In real life, I think fathers tend to push their sons because they want good things for their kids and don't want to see them repeat the same mistakes they made. Speaking for myself, that's an issue I had with my sons. And you really only get a small window of opportunity to impress those lessons on them before they are out the door.
We're on better ground now. I've accepted that they will repeat the same mistakes and learn their lessons the hard way. I'll be here to listen to them moan about it, but I'm not gonna say "I told you so." Sometimes people would rather be wrong on their terms than right on somebody else's terms, as one of my wise friends told me.
> I never got the impression that he outright hated his kid.
Perhaps he didn't, but that was the way his son felt about it, and he must have intuited it strongly to mention it in his last letter, don't you think?
I didn't get the impression that Paul pushed his son, but mostly that he was ... maybe kind of repelled by him because of the circumstances of his birth, and being stuck alone with so much responsbility.
For me that was one of the few things that made a real impression on me that this movie was strongly human.