You don’t get to choose your family. Some of us get lucky and get along with who the universe has chosen for us, but others aren’t so lucky. Take Laura Jaconi (Vera Farmiga) in the trailer for “Boundaries,” talking about her father in her therapist’s office. She clearly has issues to spare.
Laura’s family is a highly-functional, dysfunctional family. She’s a struggling single mother in her thirties whose maladjusted, yet exceptionally talented, 14-year-old son Henry (Lewis MacDougall) just got kicked out of school. When it rains it pours and in the midst of dealing with her son being expelled and having to find the money to send him to an art school where he can thrive, Laura’s miscreant father Jack, played by Christopher Plummer, gets kicked out of, yet another, nursing home for his nefarious activities.
In an “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” sort of agreement with her father, Laura finds herself driving him to California in exchange for the money needed to send Henry to art school. Naturally, this isn’t your typical road trip movie. They veer off course quickly and often when Jack decides to make a couple of stops to visit his art-forging friend (Christopher Lloyd) and old Hollywood client (Peter Fonda), and Henry asks to see his deadbeat dad Leonard (Bobby Cannavale).
Writer/director Shana Feste penned the movie from the heart and as you’d imagine, it’s semi-autobiographical. The filmmaker’s father was a pot dealer, card shark, six-times married with multi-kids; an overall charismatically immoral gent (the real-life dad also appears in the movie buying weed from Plummer). Feste said that he paid her entire college tuition via illicit activities, “I would get packages delivered to my dorm with thousands of dollars of cash.”
The film will be released nationally on June 22, 2018, which makes it the perfect Father’s Day “Father-Daughter date” movie.