Review: Tom Huang Looks at Depression with Dealing With Dad: Humor and Heart in Family Comedy

A viewer need not specifically be from a Taiwanese-American immigrant family to understand the dysfunction at the heart of Dealing With Dad, which just screened at the Oxford Film Festival.

While there may be some culturally specific quirks, it’s not like the Taiwanese have a global monopoly on moms who want their daughters to marry doctors or dads who make their love conditional on straight-A grades.

But while it may be a truism that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way, the sort of top-down coldness combined with sibling rivalry on display here ought to strike some sort of chord in anyone with siblings or parents.

The twist that makes this story different, however, is novel. In this case, the eternally angry patriarch (Dana Lee) has been laid off and fallen into depression. And frankly, his family prefers him that way, because he now lacks the energy to be a full-time asshole.

Like that episode of Friends where the boyfriend was only a fun guy when drunk, this poses a dilemma. Should family members do the responsible thing and get the man proper treatment? Or should they refrain, knowing that healthy Dad is a raging dick? Such is the dilemma of sole daughter Margaret (Ally Maki), the last to hear about the situation.

Mom (Page Leong) deals with the situation passive-aggressively, as she does with everything. Youngest son Larry (Hayden Szeto), who lives at home still, is glad of the peace and quiet, allowing him to focus on his gaming and collectible toy trading. Margaret forces her other brother Roy (Peter S. Kim) to come along with her, even though he’s in the midst of a divorce and using food to compensate. It’s a bit like The Farewell in reverse – instead of convincing grandma that everything is fine so she can have a good time, everyone must persuade dad he’s not fine so they can have a bad time again.

Writer-director Tom Huang shows us just enough of Margaret in Type A personality mode in her regular life, dominating her PTA meeting and office emails like a master planner so that we have a point of reference when she gets back to her family and immediately backslides into needy sister/daughter mode. All it takes is a greeting from mom like, “It’s been so long, I thought maybe you two got sick and died” to bring all the baggage right back. Margaret’s married, with child, to a black musician. Her mother insists she’s not racist but merely dislikes any possible mate without an “M.D.” at the end of his name.

Margaret has a recurring dream of drowning, featuring an extremely impressive-for-the-budget flooding corridor like a non-bloody Overlook Hotel. To compensate, she rapidly solves Rubik’s cubes after waking up. It’s specific details like these that give the larger arcs their authenticity. And with Larry, in particular, the dialogue verges into Kevin Smith-style pop-culture riffing, be it the difference between Dragon Ball Z and GT, or a particular Game of Thrones plot point that leads a waiter to ask, “Can I incest you in dessert?” Nerd culture is universal, at least for dudes – Margaret is too uber-responsible to have time for as much pop culture, though she can drop references with the best of them when intoxicated.

Drowning dreams aside, Huang’s visuals are mostly functional, likely contingent on locations he was able to obtain. Occasionally he comes up with something striking, like Larry’s late-night walk home, but mostly, these scenes take place in bland interiors, allowing the focus to remain on sibling banter. Dad’s bedroom, which is a taken-over version of Margaret’s, does the most with blue lighting and incongruous feminine clutter, emphasizing his new nature as a “Chinese Gollum,” per Roy.

As fun as it may be to watch brothers and sister bicker, the real satisfaction in a film like this is the moment when (and this is more of a trope than a spoiler) the adult kids finally lose it and righteously chew out their elders for everything. One key revelation may come a little too conveniently, but the slow unfolding of past emotional abuse builds to a crescendo that should have anyone’s scolded inner child cheering the climactic shoutfests on.

Crucially, every single thing does not get all better, though enough plot points resolve to satisfy the need for some closure. Huang knows better than to infer that such a difficult family would ever fix all their issues. And by extension, he suggests that you should, too. But that doesn’t mean don’t try.

Dealing with Dad recently received an Honorable Mention at Oxford Film Festival and is a Nominee for Cleveland International Film Festival‘s American Independents Competition.

Dealing With Dad: Humor and Heart in Family Comedy