Someday, maybe soon, there is bound to be a special section on Prime Video or even the Criterion Channel dedicated to movies starring real-life parent-offspring acting teams ideally playing parents and offspring. Though Ethan Hawke has directed his daughter Maya, I await the day they appear on screen together the way that Sean Penn and Dylan Penn acted as father and daughter in Flag Day, which Penn pere also directed. Included in this special section will surely be Bleeding Love, which stars Ewan McGregor and his daughter Clara McGregor playing an estranged father and daughter on a road trip through the American Southwest. Movie fans looking for subtext will certainly latch on to the intelligence that Ewan and Clara’s mother separated some time ago and in the meantime Ewan remarried and started a new family, so there is a certain amount of added value frisson to the plot, which has the unnamed father, a recovering alcoholic who left his wife and daughter some years ago to start a new family, showing up suddenly at the hospital where the daughter herself is recovering from an overdose, and then deciding to take her to Santa Fe to visit an artist friend on the spur of the moment in order to rekindle her creative mojo as a means of steering her away from drugs, since she was once an aspiring painter. Perceptive viewers will find this m.o. suspicious and quickly figure out the father’s real intentions, but until that point we are treated to some fairly intense sequences of awkward silences and even more awkward attempts by the father to recapture the intimacy these two felt when he was a happy drunk and she was a little kid.

The McGregors are totally dedicated to and credible in the roles they assume, but the dialogue and the situations written by Clara, Ruby Caster, and Vera Bulder does them no favors. Aside from the hackneyed addict cliches that the script ticks off like items on a shopping list, the whole road trip structure reveals a lack of imagination. There’s the detour to the trailer park full of poor folk with their own substance (and gun) problems, a big dustup in a motel room that results in Clara hitting up a creep at a liquor store for a free high, and lots of flashbacks showing seemingly better times that feel fake, if only because McGregor’s Scottish accent makes it difficult for us to believe he’s an All-American blue collar type obsessed with baseball. Even the running joke of the daughter’s constant need to urinate at the side of the truck loses steam and meaning early on. Director Emma Westenberg’s attempts at impressionism, as when a sex worker does an interpretive dance in the headlights of the father’s pickup truck, come across as non sequiturs rather than instances of shared purpose among characters whose most pertinent trait is desperation in the face of shattered dreams.

Another estranged father-daughter duo is at the center of the British indie Scrapper, but the actors who play 12-year-old Georgie (Lola Campbell) and her ne-er-do-well father, Jason (Harris Dickinson), are not related, and Jason has had nothing to do with Georgie’s life since Georgie’s mother pushed him away before she was born. After the mother dies, Georgie, as headstrong a kid as you’re likely to meet in any movie, endeavors to live by herself by making up an uncle-guardian named Winston Churchill to stave off social services and selling boosted bicycle parts for cash. When Jason hears of the mother’s death he shows up on Georgie’s doorstep—or, more precisely, climbing over her back fence—but Georgie won’t have him. So he has to blackmail her into letting him stay, which is, frankly, pretty easy to do given her circumstances

Since there never seems to be a lot at stake, the relationship is free to make its way to the inevitable coming-to-terms, and director-writer Charlotte Regan is hard put to create believable conflicts, which means she has to fall back on her characters, who are appealing in that they know how to get around the system and even the law without actually making anyone suffer. It’s implied strongly that Jason’s past is checkered and that he’s somehow turned himself around, but Regan is reluctant to go into details, as if finding out, say, that Jason might be a felon would darken the viewer’s opinion of him. Georgie, of course, has an excuse for her larcenous, dissembling ways—she’s a kid, and we accept the precociousness because she’s got to survive. But everything is on the surface with these two as far as emotional maturity goes, which means they end up bonding over practical matters: Jason agrees to help Georgie steal a bicycle, seemingly because he really wants to prove he loves her in his own weird way. It’s an angle that Regan should have explored more boldly. 

Bleeding Love now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).

Scrapper now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608).

Bleeding Love home page in Japanese

Scrapper home page in Japanese

Bleeding Love photo (c) 2024 Sobini Films, Inc.

Scrapper photo (c) Scrapper Films Limited, British Broadcasting Corporation and the British Film Institute 2022