Photo: A24/courtesy Everett Collection
You’ve probably heard that young Americans are experiencing an unprecedented parenting crisis. The surgeon general declared parenthood a nationwide health emergency. Birth rates have been declining steadily for two decades. Sam Altman thinks AI chatbots should prepare children for their days on the way to school.
In the midst of all this is Jordan Firstman’s directorial debut, Children’s Cluba movie that makes you laugh a minute and cry into your popcorn, small in scale but big in feeling. He makes a strong case for the positive impact of children on the sometimes directionless lives of adults. When queer party organizer Peter learns that he had a baby the one time he accidentally had sex with a woman (yes, it’s medically possible; yes, it’s a movie), he must quickly go from doing coke on the coffee table to caring for another human – 10-year-old Arlo. Can a rebellious gay man with a few thousand dollars in his bank account take responsibility for a child? Some of Peter’s friends think clearly absolutely not. But what does a child really need from an adult?
Many have compared Children’s Club to the 1999 Adam Sandler film, Grandpawhere, in a much more cis and straight world, Sandler’s character adopts a child to win back the affections of a woman who deemed him too immature. The plots are eerily similar, but – perhaps this is my hetero-pessimism speaking – the vibes couldn’t be more different. To use Children’s Clubthe language, while the film “gives” Grandpait’s more spiritually connected to Mike Mills’ terrific 2021 film, Come on Come onwhich starred Joaquin Phoenix as a single uncle who gets stuck with his sister’s child for a while and whose heart grows three sizes in the process.
As in Come on Come onthe chemistry between Firstman’s Peter and the excellent Reggie Absolom’s Arlo is as palpable as an EDM beat, and the audience finds themselves wishing that someone would look at us the same way these two look at each other. Despite his precocious musical tastes (“But I like Björk!”), Arlo is not a unrealistic child. It comes close to, but never quite crosses, that creaky rubicon of “Curly Sue” in which a magical child turns a bad adult (usually a straight white man) good with courage and probing truisms. Sure, he’s eager to please and strangely comfortable around adults, but many parentified children adopt these traits to survive. (We learn throughout the film that Arlo’s mother was not capable of keeping him safe, even though she loved him very much.)
Anyone with children in their life can feel how Arlo’s impact on Peter is truly ingrained in the film. The love it builds is almost painfully tender, like the pain I feel when I look at my daughter’s sleeping face after she calls me the worst mom in the world for making a spicy dinner. I know she doesn’t think so, that being a child in an adult world is strange and cruel and sacred. “He’s cleaner than me,” Peter says of his son. Hold back the tears.
How do you become a good father? Peter doesn’t really seem to know it, but loving Arlo allows him to love himself, and we watch that growth over the course of a tight two-hour runtime in surprisingly authentic beats for a somewhat hackneyed premise (see Grandpaabove). In a tense scene, Peter wonders if he should put Arlo in a very adult situation that he and others are counting on. As a parent myself, who wasn’t exactly a fucking stranger on “G” when my kids were born but who has grown up considerably in the decade since, it was a revelation to watch Peter learn to define the boundaries that needed to be created between his child and the world, and realize, not without horror, that it is he who must set them. You may be holding your breath at this point in the film because you’re afraid for Arlo, but perhaps also because you’re witnessing the uneven and messy metamorphosis that we humans undergo when tasked with caring for other people.
Arlo doesn’t judge Peter’s queer community, and they, in turn, don’t judge him. They know how shitty the world can be, and they let him have fun in it, get angry in it, whatever he needs to do. There is no pathologization here. Additionally, many children who grow up in two-parent heterosexual homes do quite poorly. What’s so horrible about giving a single gay man in active ketamine withdrawal a chance?
Peter is not alone in his initial confusion about what purpose a child might serve in his life: published just a few months ago, journalist Anna Louie Sussman’s book Inconceivable: the impossibility of starting a family in a time of uncertainty laid out the countless reasons (last family policy, crappy economy, lack of community) why we don’t want to or can’t have kids. In 2024 What are children for?by philosophers Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, an entire book is written about the ambivalence of Millennials and Generation Z toward raising children. Last year If I had legs I’d kick you, a very different film that encapsulates, above all, the difficult side of parenting that older Millennials may have emphasized Also a lot, was unwatchable for some (not me!) for this reason. Look Children’s ClubI was concerned that some viewers would be too uncomfortable with the casual references to Arlo’s past and future trauma, or the precarious situations Peter puts him in (these are not treated casually, however, although they are filled with humor). Unfortunately, we live in a society that takes terrible care of children. In the United States, more than 10 million children live in poverty. One in seven people are victims of abuse or neglect. At least 200,000 people have had a parent detained by immigration in the past two years. Children’s Club hurts for Arlo and leads the audience to wish he had a parent who has his shit together. But it respects the reality of childhood by not neglecting how difficult childhood is for most children.
Another fall film about how children can alter their father’s path in interesting and new ways is the remarkable film. Your mother Your mother Your motherwhich stars Mahershala Ali as a hitman named Latif whose wife dies and leaves him to care for his three children while trying to get out of a job he doesn’t want to do. Just like Children’s Clubis Peter, the juxtapositions between Latif’s lifestyle and his parenting never get old, and AMMAMYM brings us the most cutting-edge breastfeeding scene you never knew you needed. It’s a premise that’s perhaps a little more outlandish than a gay man’s one-time vaginal ejaculation that happens a decade later, but quality writing and acting (and a breathtaking performance from Adia as Latif’s teenage daughter Fatiha) keeps the parent-child relationships grounded.
There’s some killer sword work in it AMMAMYMbut it’s ultimately a story about how love for your children saves you – from inertia and heartbreak and, most importantly, from yourself. By doing AMMAMYMThe film’s writer and director, Bassam Tariq, a father of two, wanted to explore what happens when children see the worst aspects of their father, the “monster side”. Her thesis, in life and in the film, is that as long as you continue to show up authentically to your children, they will love you no matter what. There are perhaps, and should be, some exceptions to this rule, but while I don’t consider myself a pronatalist, I can’t help but present this as one of the most powerful reasons to procreate.
We know what these movies are for, kids think, but what are adults for, especially in a time when it’s hard for them to find jobs or housing, or when a global pandemic has disrupted the rhythm of their young adulthood and they’re still stuck six years later? Firstman, 35, has yet to have children, although he donated sperm for his sister’s partner’s baby, becoming an uncle for the first time on the last day of filming. Children’s Club. He said, however, that the process of making this film forced him to grow. “I needed to change and I didn’t know how,” he told the audience at Children’s Club projections. Luckily for him, he managed to transform himself while still making one hell of a film. For the rest of us, there’s always parenting.
Gn entert
