The Breadwinner

Directed by Eric Appel, The Breadwinner follows Nate Bargatze’s Nate Wilcox as he’s forced to become a stay-at-home dad after his wife (Mandy Moore’s Katie) attempts to get her business off the ground. It’s an appealing, promising setup that is, at the outset, employed to affable (if far-from-hilarious) effect by Appel, as the filmmaker, armed with Dan Lagana and Bargatze’s screenplay, delivers a breezy comedy that benefits from its lighthearted sensibilities and Bargatze’s agreeable central performance – with the actor’s likeable turn certainly matched by familiar periphery players like Kumail Nanjiani, Colin Jost, and Will Forte. It’s clear, then, that The Breadwinner‘s downfall is triggered by an increasingly lackluster midsection suffused with less-than-captivating subplots and digressions, and there’s little doubt, as well, that the picture’s relentless emphasis on sitcom-level happenings slowly-but-surely renders its positive attributes moot – with the growing reliance on eye-rollingly melodramatic episodes within the third act only exacerbating the tiresome feel. By the time the larger-than-life climax, in which Nate rides through town on a horse (!), rolls around, The Breadwinner has confirmed its place as a distressing misfire that bodes very poorly for Bargatze’s future big-screen endeavors.

** out of ****