Like Father, Like Son and Philomena

Like Father, Like Son (2013). Director: Hirozaku Koreeda

Philomena (2013). Director: Stephen Frears

Family tie is a curious thing. It is like a tangled ball of yarn, with distinct yet inseparable fibers interweaving from the core and all the way out. Recently, two movies coincidentally explore the meaning of family ties, and each tries to disentangle the intertwined fibers in its unique way. They are Like Father, Like Son, a film that tells a story of two Japanese families discovering that their sons were switched at birth, and Philomena, a film adapted from a true story, where an Irish mother tries to reunite with her long lost son.

In Like Father, Like Son, a successful architect, Ryota, and his wife found out that their son was switched with another baby at birth and that they and another family have been raising each other’s sons for six years. This situation forces Ryota to weigh the value of bloodline against his emotional investment for somebody else’s son during the past six years. Unable to choose one over the other, Ryota considers the possibility of taking the custody of his real son and the son that he’s had for six years. However, Ryota later decides that bloodline is what really matters for a family and persuades the other family to switch the boys. Having his real son back doesn’t make Ryota happy, and through his own struggling with the meaning of a family, Ryota realizes that he never truly knew what it means to be a father. 

Like Father, Like Son approaches the question of what it means to be a family from a father’s perspective. I argues against the traditional, patriarchal view that bloodline is ultimately what constitutes a family. A few dialogue, happening during Ryota’s struggle with who is really his son and delivered from mothers’ point of view, offer excellent counterpoints to this value. When Ryota is troubled by the prospect that the son he’s had for six years will eventually start to look after the parents from the other family, his mother tells him that people who live as a family will eventually start to look like one another, just like married couples do. Unfortunately, this doesn’t give Ryota consolation. Another such dialogue happens when the wife of the other family tells Ryota that he cares so much about whether his “son” looks like him is because he has no real connection to the boy as a father. Being a strict father and reserved man for almost the entire movie, Ryota expressed his love and regrets to his son in scene at the end that is undoubtedly the most touching moment I’ve seen in movies for a while. 

It’s not a flaw in any way, but one thing that is somewhat missing from Like Father, Like Son is how Ryota’s wife feels about the whole situation, as she is hardly the focus of the narrative most of the time. In a way, Philomena provides just such perspective. After giving birth to a son out of wedlock, Philomena is forced to give him away for adoption. She keeps the secret for fifty years but eventually embarks on a journey to the U.S. to find her son with the help of a journalist. Without spoiling too much of the story, Philomena doesn’t get to reunite with her son but finds out, to her great comfort, that her son never forgets her and has also been trying to find her. The story of Philomena illustrates the bond between mother and son from a female perspective. Because it is based on a true story, this film makes moves the viewers with an everlasting connection between a mother and her son, even though their time together as a family only represents a small fraction of their lives. 

Back to the yarn analogy at the beginning, the two movies together give us a good look at the essence of family ties by tracing different fibers to their very roots. But they also let us realize that perhaps we ought to leave the ball of yarn as tangled as it is, because that is how it should be.