Ode to My Father (2014)
Cast: Jeong-min Hwang, Yunjin Kim, Dal-su Oh
Director: Youn Jk
Country: South Korea
Genre: Drama
Editor’s Note: Ode to My Father opens in US and Canada on January 9.
The effectiveness of a melodrama often comes down to how well a film makes you relate to the characters and their outsized pain. A great melodrama is so engrossing, it forces you to contend with the titanic weight of the emotions on display, but it also in some sense replicates the way you experience emotions. Your pain is the greatest pain you will ever know and your tragedies happen on a more massive scale from your perspective than anything else in your life. In a lesser melodrama, the disconnect results in a detachment from the characters from the outset—they react in such an overdrawn matter, we can’t possibly relate to them (even though, in a better film, we would).
Ode to My Father fairly consistently nails the emotional tone it is going for, even as it is less stellar when it comes to stringing together a plot.
Ode to My Father fairly consistently nails the emotional tone it is going for, even as it is less stellar when it comes to stringing together a plot. It is difficult to do a film that attempts to encapsulate an era, or a century, while telling the story of a life. Most lives reside in the shadows of massive events, in the spaces between the lines in history books. Yet, there is a subgenre of films (Forrest Gump is the most prominent example) that try to put one man at the front and center of the march of time, to hit on the major events of a life as if they are all that matters, when what actually matters is what happens on the fringes and in between. Life is lived just outside the frame in a film like this, where ordinary people are facing ordinary problems, and living lives that don’t pull them into the spotlight whenever there is a tectonic shift in history.
Deok-soo (Hwang Jung-min) begins the film (after a frame tale that finds he and his wife looking out over their home city Busan) separated from his father and younger sister by the ravages of the Korean War. From there, he has but one goal: to find his father and sister and make his family whole again. Unfortunately, his father tasked him with supporting the family, and so he does what it takes—including becoming a miner in West Germany and thrusting himself into the mire of the Vietnam War—to keep his family afloat.
Along the way, he meets and falls in love with Young-ja (Yunjin Kim), a young nurse who is taken with him instantly, even as she keeps her distance, and begins a family of his own. Ode to My Father is at its best when it is focused on Deok-soo’s feelings towards his family, both the one he has lost and the one he is trying to build in its stead. Too often, the film is focused only on portraying the historical sweep of the twentieth century through the eyes of Deok-soo. But in the brief courtship between Deok-soo and Young-ja, and in the moments where all he lost on that beach in what would become North Korea weigh on him, the film approaches something akin to an effective melodrama.
I was moved deeply by some moments in Ode to My Father…but those moments reflected the movie I wished I was watching more than the one actually playing out.
I was moved deeply by some moments in Ode to My Father (especially one late in the film that hit me like a punch to the gut, even as its far more melodramatic precursor fell somewhat flat for me), but those moments reflected the movie I wished I was watching more than the one actually playing out. Instead, the majority of the film is a series of thinly connected set pieces that read like a SparkNotes for the latter half of the twentieth century. When the film focuses on Deok-soo as a character, it is an effective melodrama; but too often, Deok-soo is lost to the tide of history and to the points the film would rather be making. In a better film, that might have been part of the point, a commentary on how that is the state of us all, in some sense. Yet Ode to My Father is too busy building a monument to its vision of history to recognize the wondrous elegy it could have been instead.
When the film focuses on Deok-soo as a character, it is an effective melodrama; but too often, Deok-soo is lost to the tide of history and to the points the film would rather be making. In a better film, that might have been part of the point, a commentary on how that is the state of us all, in some sense. Yet Ode to My Father is too busy building a monument to its vision of history to recognize the wondrous elegy it could have been instead.
