If there’s one thing we need in 2026, it’s a new comedy about how men are bad at housework. Wait, did I say 2026? Sorry, that was a typo. I meant “never.” Watching a man in an apron destroy the family kitchen was old when “Mr. Mom” did it in 1983. It was old when “I Love Lucy” did it in 1952. I don’t think the Lumière Brothers made a comedy like this in the late 1890s, but if somebody pitched it, I think they’d have rolled their eyes.
“The Breadwinner” stars stand-up comedian Nate Bargatze as Nate Wilcox, a car salesman who lets his wife, Katie (Mandy Moore), do all the mom stuff. And apparently all the dad stuff. She parents their three daughters, cleans the house, cooks the food, hires independent contractors, and all Nate has to do is take out the garbage. Get this, folks: Nate can’t even take out the garbage without messing it up. Men, am I right?
To his credit, Nate isn’t a sexist pig. He doesn’t think women belong in the kitchen and when Katie invents a clever scheduling doodad and pitches it on “Shark Tank,” he supports her completely. When the Sharks humiliate Nate on live television, and say they’ll only invest in Katie’s dream if he becomes a stay-at-home dad — which is a distractingly strange plot point — he doesn’t fight it. Nate is willing to take care of his family. But only for two weeks. Then they’ll go back to the status quo. Let’s not go nuts or anything.
Alas, Nate has the audacity, on his first morning of momming, to make scrambled eggs for breakfast. This doofus didn’t know his daughters recently and randomly decided they don’t eat scrambled eggs. Haha! Oh no, now the toaster is broken! Wait, it was just unplugged. Nate, you silly goose!
“The Breadwinner” has more stale corny bits than a Kellogg’s factory dumpster. Sure, it’s made for families but that’s a terrible excuse. Families deserve better movies than this. Every movie doesn’t have to be a classic, but I’m pretty sure every comedy should at least try to be funny, and “The Breadwinner” isn’t trying very hard. It leans on every boring cliché in the book. And it’s not a well-written book.
Eric Appel, who also directed the ingenious comedy biopic “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” can’t seem to figure out what the appeal of this movie is. It’s not schadenfreude, because Nate’s not a big enough jerk to deserve his suffering, and the suffering is fairly minimal anyway. It’s not a film about breaking all of Mom’s stuffy house rules, because the kids like their mom’s rules, and they don’t take full advantage of Dad’s ineptitude. So there’s no karmic justice, there’s no wish fulfillment, there’s just the halfhearted revelation that housework is hard. As if anyone who would willingly go to a movie about housework doesn’t know that.
“The Breadwinner” is a relatively harmless movie, but “relatively harmless” isn’t the kind of compliment you put on a poster (although that kind of honesty would be a pleasant change of pace). It does raise the question, however, of why a film this retro gets a major summer release in the mid-2020s. I’m sure there’s an audience, since there’s an audience for everything, even if it’s a small one, but “The Breadwinner” sure seems like a canary in the cultural coal mine.
If we’ve regressed so far in gender politics that the idea of a woman going to work and a man doing chores feels fresh again, that’s a disquieting thought. And “Disquieting thoughts!” is definitely not the kind of thing you put on a movie poster, unless it’s an arthouse horror movie. “The Breadwinner” isn’t great art, and it’s only a horror movie in an abstract sense, but hey… at least it’s got a house. That’s something. Not much, but something.
