With Gwynneth Paltrow’s mother and Tom Hagen. I was traumatized by this film as a teenager. It was utterly real to me. Oddly enough these days I have more sympathy for the father’s character, especially his reaction to the way his family shuts him out. It’s clear he’s not so much a bad guy as a man trapped inside of his own conception of what a man should be like. In the end he has nothing left except bluster and empty bullying. Somehow Robert Duvall managed to capture my own father in a sadly forgotten movie.
