109 min | PG-13 | June 18, 2021 | Netflix
An advertising guy loses his wife the day after their daughter is born and has to raise the girl alone. Kevin Hart drops the manic act and plays it straight. The grief is real. The screenplay is greeting-card.
Matt loses his wife the day after she gives birth. He is left with a newborn daughter and no idea how to keep her alive. Fatherhood follows him through the panic of those first weeks and into the harder years of raising Maddy alone. The film wants to be a portrait of a man learning to parent through grief. It settles for a portrait of a man learning lessons that arrive on schedule.
Kevin Hart plays Matt with the volume turned down. He strips out the rapid-fire delivery that made his name and finds a quieter register of exhaustion and fear. The performance works best in small physical moments. He fumbles a diaper and holds the baby like she might break. Melody Hurd plays the older Maddy with a self-possession that gives Hart something to push against. Alfre Woodard plays Matt’s mother-in-law Marian as a woman convinced Matt cannot do this, and her certainty sharpens every scene she enters.
Paul Weitz directs from a script he wrote with Dana Stevens. The film leans on a warm, even light that flattens the apartment into a sitcom space and undercuts the loss the story keeps invoking. Weitz stages the grief in soft focus and resolves each conflict before it can cut. The script builds its obstacles in pairs, a parenting crisis matched to a workplace crisis, and clears both with a montage and a speech. The structure telegraphs every beat before it lands.
Fatherhood has a true story underneath it and a real performance at its center. Hart proves he can carry a drama when a film asks him to stop performing. The screenplay does not ask enough of him. It reaches for the easy tears every time the hard ones are right there, and a story about surviving the unsurvivable turns into a story about hitting its marks.