When a supermom lands a Shark Tank deal, she switches roles with her breadwinner husband, who struggles to adapt as a stay-at-home dad to their three daughters.
Nate Bargatze’s standard deadpan style provides the laughs in “The Breadwinner,” a domestic comedy in which a stay-at-home dad must learn to be a good dad when his wife goes back to work. As he tackles diaper duty and household drudgery he never took the time to appreciate before, he quickly realizes that emptying diaper pails and getting oneself to a baseball game is a lot harder than it looks. The resulting mild chaos and moralizing is punctuated with quiet jokes and a deadpan nod to the audience, with Bargatze accepting that the hardest job in the world is being a dad.
The biggest problem with “The Breadwinner” is also its greatest strength: because it knows exactly the audience it wants to play to, it aims right for its mark. All of Bargatze’s schtick plays well in a script in which people’s midsection reactions to what he goes through provide the bulk of the humor, and if you’re a fan of the comedian, you’ll probably enjoy having this little dad around for a few hours. And, happily, it’s also squeaky clean for families that want to keep their kids away from inappropriate content, leaning on gangly slapstick, domestic mess-ups, and generational trolling to generate its humor rather than on toilet humor or edgy material. It drives home its themes of family, work, and marriage and rewardingly bad parenting with a gentle, genuine touch.
The problem is that “The Breadwinner” is unoriginal enough that it rarely takes any creative risks with its premise. It struggles to maintain interest or energy and feels as if it was lifted from an earlier flick on the topic, especially “Mr. Mom”; its reliance on the “dumb dad” trope lets viewers predict every twist before it happens.
Even the drowsiness from the slow pace is (literally) enough to put a damper on the comedy, and its corporate product placement is so heavy that you can never quite tell where “The Breadwinner” ends and Applebee’s begins.
And Bargatze’s deadpan approach may be too slow for some, and it can feel as if the audience is as passive as his unempathetic characters.
“The Breadwinner” is a mishmash that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. It strives to be a contemporary family comedy, but most of what it has to say has been said before, and overplayed at that. It tries to celebrate involved fatherhood, but it gets too mired in jokes about doting fathers who don’t know what to do, until it becomes cliché. It provides well-meaning, family-safe entertainment that is amusing at times and forgettable at others.
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