Forty-three years ago, there was a hit film called “Mr. Mom.” It’s about a laid-off auto worker (Michael Keaton) who swaps roles with his homemaker wife (Teri Garr) so she can re-enter her former profession, advertising, and support the family. If you haven’t seen “Mr. Mom,” no worries: “The Breadwinner,” the screenwriting and film acting debut of standup comic Nate Bargatze, is the same story with different details: a career-obsessed, mentally checked-out dad gets a taste of what it’s like to be a stay-at-home parent, and is so humbled by the experience that he learns what’s really important in life: [Vin Diesel voice] FAMMMMMBLY.
Bargatze’s character is a Toyota salesman named Nate who swaps places with his homemaker wife Katie (Mandy Moore) after she lands a deal on “Shark Tank.” Right there, you’ve got two problems. Such a cliched protagonist needs to be played by an actor with an edge, somebody who uses his charisma like the blade of a bulldozer. Bargatze, who hails from Tennessee, is a “clean comic” who riffs mainly on marriage, children, and life’s everyday irritations, in a twangy, dazed monotone that suggests Owen Wilson after waking up from a nap. Bargatze had a hit 2017 Netflix special, Billboard says he was the top-grossing comic of 2024, and I think he’s pretty funny considering the limitations he put on himself. But his energy does not say “go-gettter who just won Salesman of the Year and needs to be humbled so he can appreciate his family,” but something closer to “the quiet guy in a group of otherwise loud friends who smiles like he’s secretly in pain.”
Moore, meanwhile, is stuck in a role you’ve seen in gazillions of movies and TV comedies: the sweet, funny, attractive, supercompetent wife and mother who married a clueless, self-centered, domestically useless dunderhead and, seemingly, likes it. Moore’s got the sugar-cookie sweetness to play such a (two-dimensional) woman, but she’s hard to accept as a budding entrepreneur relentless enough to win at “Shark Tank.”
Though “Mr. Mom” was a sleeper hit, it was criticized at the time (the Reagan/Thatcher era) for basing its comedy on the assumption that men are innately bad at raising kids and running a household, as if no man in history had previously been called upon to do those things. “Everybody Loves Raymond” extracted 210 episodes from this premise, which is repeated and reinforced today in movies like this one; in contemporary TV sitcoms, a few of which star the same people who were doing this stuff decades earlier; and in stand-up routines where a guy acts bewildered by the existence of throw pillows.
Who benefits from the affectionate pigeonholing of men and women into genetic types who are coded for boy stuff and girl stuff? You know the answer. American popular culture has been reassuring citizens for nearly a century that it’s not unusual for men to forget their partner’s birthday, fail to attend their children’s school functions (or attend but spend the entire event on their phone taking care of Important Business), and make up excuses to avoid attending book clubs and brunches.
Thus does Nate, the latest addition to pop culture’s Gallery of Weaponized Incompetence, sally forth to do battle with his manhood, having apparently contributed nothing to his family up to that point besides DNA and a steady paycheck. Following in the footsteps of “Mr. Mom” and their variants, Nate distractedly double-books his daughter’s spelling bee with the car dealership’s party celebrating his Salesman of the Year win (coveted by his ultra-competitive colleague, played by Kumail Nanjiani; at least that subplot has a hilarious payoff).
He also tries to win another daughter’s affection by agreeing to her request for a pony (actually a fully grown horse), gets tangled up in boneheaded schemes that ultimately lay waste to the house itself; and tries to slow the household’s death spiral by applying techniques he learned by selling Toyotas, all at the same time that his dear wife is barreling towards the final round of her “Shark Tank” stint. The movie presents these tired shenanigans in the wide-and-narrow CinemaScope-style frame shape that’s more often used for epics, genre films, and, well, comedies with some visual personality (like “The Graduate,” “Rushmore,” or “500 Days of Summer”). That last category does not include “The Breadwinner,” a feature film that looks and plays like a single-camera sitcom puffed up by creative ambitions that no one involved followed through on. (Tellingly, in 2019 Bargatze developed and shot a self-starring pilot that he described as “a combination of ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Everybody Loves Raymond,’ but it didn’t get picked up as a series.)
Of course, by the end, we arrive at the mandatory humbling: the husband profusely apologizes to his family for the emotional and architectural damage he caused, but assures them that he meant well and learned from the experience. You can watch “The Breadwinner” yourself to see how this template is customized by Bargatze, co-screenwriter Dan Lagana, and longtime sitcom director Eric Appel (“Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” a clever comedic biopic that’s a thousand times better than this).
Suffice to say it’s one of the most obliviously ghastly endings to a feature-length comedy since “You’ve Got Mail,” wherein a small bookstore owner learns that the man she’s sweet on is a top executive for the international big-box bookstore chain that put her out of business and hid this information from her as long as he could, but forgives him because he’s cute and funny. These sorts of movies do more damage to the culture than any bloody horror flick you can name, because they make the unforgivable adorable.
