There’s some serious daddy issues at play between Ed Harris and Jason Sudeikis in the Kodachome trailer for Netflix. In the tradition of Netflix, so far, this movie is both touching and amusing in equal measures it seems so far. Sudeikis plays the part of a man that hasn’t seen his father in years since there’s really no chemistry between them and his father was apparently a terrible husband and a worse father. Ed Harris, the father figure, is a famous photographer that seems to have let his work take over his life and left his son and wife to fend for themselves more often than not. That’s how it seems thus far, as the kind of animosity that Sudeikis’ character shows is hardly every by accident and usually tends to be the kind of resentment that builds up over time and ends up turning a person completely against the individual that they feel hurt them the worst.
Yet when it turns out that his father has four rolls of very rare Kodachrome film that have yet to be developed Sudeikis learns that his father wants him to go on a cross-country trip with him to Kansas, the only place that is still able to process the film. What happens during the trip as evidenced by the trailer is that Sudeikis gets to know his father a bit better, after he learns that he’s dying. It seems like a trip taken in order for Harris to finally come clean about who he is and why he is the person he turned out to be. In essence it’s a way for him to say goodbye to the son that hates him and explain why his life turned out this way. The level of resentment that would exist in this manner would be enormous no doubt, but the fact that a son would acquiesce to such a trip says that he wants answers more than anything. He wants to know who his father is even if it turns out that the man is the person he always believed him to be, a miserable old bugger that willingly left him and his mother to twist in the wind.
It’s also a story about an artist that is one of the best at what he does, and how that art is born of something other than just love. There’s love in art to be sure, but there’s suffering that a lot of people simply don’t seem to understand. Anyone can be an artist at anything, but it takes the comprehension that you will suffer for it, that you will bleed for it, and in some cases that you will allow it consume you completely without even a token amount of resistance on your part. The art becomes who you are at times and leaves everything and everyone else behind, and that is difficult to define or explain to those that can’t see it or refuse to understand why.
It’s not fair on either end, but it’s the life that people choose at times.
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