Movie review: The hi-tech disconnect in 'Parental Guidance'

The generation gap is old fodder for Hollywood, be it in comedies or dramas. Yet "Parental Guidance" (written by Lisa Addario and Joe Syracuse, directed by Andy Fickman) may be worth seeing for its stars Bette Midler and Billy Crystal.

Midler and Crystal star as Diane and Artie, grandparents who are dealing with both an age gap and a technological gap between them and their grandkids.

And yes, that’s already funny. The movie is banking on that familiar disconnect many grandparents all over the world might have with the internet and social media like Facebook.

It also widens that technological gap to the extreme, with a house all wired to a computer program. It’s a prototype, and the family living in the house are its guinea pigs, so to speak. The more obvious conflict is having the grandparents come in and babysit kids who are used, not just to the technology, but to the routine and order this allows.

It is also what informs the kind of parenting the kids are used to—the kind of control that the parents (Marisa Tomei and Tom Everett Scott) insist on. Which is also to say allowing the kids (Bailee Madison, Joshua Rush and Kylie Harrison) an amount of freedom when it comes to expressing themselves: use words to explain anger and discontent, color beyond those lines.

And yet these kids are not allowed to have sugar, are used to meals where they’re served what they want, are not allowed to watch scary films. They do not play, as they are brought to violin lessons and baseball – where, by the way, no one loses, because competition isn’t something that kids should be taught.

Yes, there is no old school fun in this house, and the kids are as controlled by their parents as they are by the idea that there is a doctor for Turner’s stutter, and Barker can find friends if he goes on playdates. Bailee, the only girl and eldest child, is already thinking about getting into college, as she practices playing the violin.

Imagine what happens to those rules, to this controlled space, when old-school grandparenting enters the picture. Hold on, imagine that those grandparents are as cool as Diane and Artie.

So, they force the kids to eat Diane’s one-meal dinners, and then agree to order pizza because they all agree it ain’t good. You know too that the kids are going to have some sugar the moment you hear the mother say they never have it. And yes, those horror films for Turner’s viewing pleasure happen soon enough.

Yet, instead of "Parental Guidance" banking on a comedy of errors for the grandparents, it instead takes a critical stance on the hi-tech lifestyles we have, the kind that keep kids from enjoying being kids. As expected of Hollywood comedies, there is the right amount of touching moments. There is also the expected reckoning with dysfunctional familial relationships, where generation and technological gaps are bridged.

It has as happy an ending as you would expect, the kind that mainstream Hollywood always has, no matter how complex the technology-humanity dichotomy can be. And yet it is a fun comedy for a full hour and a half. Yes, it will be a theater laughing with you. If that isn’t a reminder of the value of people, I don’t know what is. — BM, GMA News

Katrina Stuart Santiago writes the essay in its various permutations, from pop culture criticism to art reviews, scholarly papers to creative non-fiction, all always and necessarily bound by Third World Philippines, its tragedies and successes, even more so its silences. She blogs at http://www.radikalchick.com. The views expressed in this article are solely her own.