Perhaps nothing is as much a shock to our sense of how things should be as a glimpse at how another so-called developed society deals with children in peril. A few years back, Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-Eda floored me with Nobody Knows, a meticulously detailed moral thriller about a quartet of school-kids abandoned in a suburban Tokyo apartment by a mother who remarries and forgets all about them. With the punch of Vittorio De Sica's Italian neo-realist classic The Bicycle Thief, Nobody Knows trumps every do-gooder PBS doc in conveying just how little neglected kids matter on a planet groaning under the weight of 7 billion souls.
In his latest child-centric tale, Like Father, Like Son, Kore-Eda offers a hint of hope as he plunges us into a tale of two families. One day, the small country hospital where their sons were born six years earlier informs both sets of parents that there was a mix-up in the maternity ward, and each took the wrong baby home. Dad #1, Ryota (handsome Masaharu Fukuyama), is a work-obsessed big-city architect who never seems to have a day to spare for his homebound wife and their cute six-year-old son, Keita. Dad #2, Yudai (Riri Furanki), is a jovial slob of a shopkeeper who plays like another kid with his little brood, including nightly communal baths.
At first, the aloof and short-tempered Ryota thinks like one of his millionaire clients: "I'll just buy these bumpkins off," and raise both Keita and Yudai's 6-year-old, the slightly taller, more stubborn Ryosuke. But Yudai and his cheerful wife resist offers of money and threats of lawsuits. Ryota is suddenly in the uncomfortable position of judging his own fitness as a human being, especially as a dad.
Filmmaker Kore-Eda lets the details of the families' daily lives accumulate slowly, like pebbles in what may turn into a beautiful rock garden. A father discovers just how much his non-blood-related son cares for him when he stumbles upon a treasure of digital photos the little boy has taken of him while he was napping or otherwise preoccupied. Gradually, a once-callous man comes face-to-face with his own demons, including memories of his own neglected childhood, in a sequence where an adult must beg a little boy for the privilege of being thought of as his Dad.
Oscar Nominated Short Documentary Film (currently playing at Landmark Theatres): Facing Fear Director Jason Cohen's parable on the possibilities of forgiveness opens on slightly out-of-focus shots of nighttime L.A. Two voices begin a haunting story that touches every angle on urban violence, from queer-bashing to the role of punk music as a staging ground for street combat. Matthew Boger's job as a guide at LA's Museum of Tolerance began in a pool of blood, as his once 13-year-old queer runaway self was beaten into unconsciousness by 14 skinheads, led by a disgruntled product of the East San Gabriel suburbs, Tim Zaal.
Miraculously surviving his kick in the head, Boger was startled by the fate of another Matthew. "In 1998, Matthew Shepard is beaten and dies seven days later. At first I didn't know why I felt so connected to his story. When he died, I realized why: I lived that night, this kid didn't. His voice was silenced forever."
Bay Area resident Cohen takes an earnest stab at reformulating the myths from violent classics like American History X and A Clockwork Orange. This powerful view of a most unlikely friendship has a real shot at Oscar gold.