Broad Sound

When my grandfather died a few years ago, I was honored to deliver the eulogy. As anyone who has spoken at a funeral can attest, however, standing in front of an audience and doing justice to the memory of a family member during one of the most emotional moments of your life is no easy thing. I’m not sure how I got through it. One thing I do remember clearly is the difficulty I had in looking at my dad as I spoke. It was heartbreaking to see him in so much pain. He was devastated by the loss of his father, uncoupled completely from his moorings. Over the following weeks and months, his closest loved ones felt helpless to provide any comfort. The more we tried talking him through his grief, the more isolated he became in the depths of it. “How could this have happened?” he would ask, as if an elderly parent’s death were inconceivable. It seemed to me there was something almost childlike in the question. I guess I just wasn’t used to thinking of him as someone’s child.

I was reminded of all this recently while watching the 2018 film Thunder Road, which begins with a funeral. In the movie’s first scene, a uniformed patrolman who’s as square as his jaw stands facing a churchful of mourners. His name is Jim Arnaud, and he has just lost his mother. As Jim starts his eulogy, we sense that he is on the verge of a meltdown. He rambles into a monologue full of bewildering digressions and discomfiting personal revelations. He strains to hold back a flood of emotions. His face crumples up. And then, all at once, he is overcome.

It’s an affecting sight, this bereft man opening up and breaking down. But the scene promptly tips into absurdity. Jim’s speech has merely been a prelude; he intends to commemorate his late mother with an interpretive dance set to Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road.” His mom ran the local dance academy, he says, and this song held a special meaning for her. It “meant leaving your small town and going to do something with your life.” In summation of this idea, Jim says, simply, “Bruce Springsteen.”

As he clumsily tries and fails to work the CD player on a small pink boombox (“Should we just call the manufacturer?” he wonders aloud), we can’t help but laugh. And as he perseveres, sans accompaniment, intently performing a choreographed routine with a lot of jazz hands and sweeping arms—all while recounting, through sobs, the story of the unplayed song (“This girl walks out on her porch and she’s listening to Roy Orbison”)—it becomes clear that we are in the presence of a singular comedic talent.

Except that Thunder Road is not a comedy, or at least not quite. In fact, one of the small miracles of the film is that even as we are laughing with it, we find ourselves sincerely moved by its depth of feeling.

The aforementioned talent is Jim Cummings, who not only stars as the grieving cop, but also wrote and directed the movie. Cummings has an uncanny ability to build scenes in which conflicting moods somehow co-exist. From one moment to the next, he expertly maneuvers the film through a series of tricky shifts in tone, alternating among wince-inducing cringe humor, weeping histrionics, and understated character beats (which are often simultaneously hilarious and poignant). It’s a delicate balance that allows space for a multitude of emotional shadings. The end result is less an outright comedy than a searching drama punctuated by painfully funny moments.

In his ability to thread these strands together seamlessly, Cummings shows a deft hand as a filmmaker—a natural instinct for staging shots, a strong command of the rules of movement and editing. He establishes a visual style that is straightforward and fluid, technically accomplished without being flashy. Even the movie’s tour-de-force opening scene, which plays out in one extremely long take, is less about trying to impress us and more about allowing us to experience Jim’s tragicomic crack-up in real time. Ultimately, what most interests Cummings are his characters’ emotional struggles.

And Jim Arnaud is most certainly struggling. Despite a kind of all-American quality, there is something a little off about him. He is a well-meaning galoot, but he is also an unstable mess who is driven by toxic notions of masculinity and a serious anger management problem.

Part of what’s so compelling about the movie, though, is the way in which Cummings insists on humanizing this character. Jim Arnaud—“one of the good guys,” as he refers to himself, the guy who played by all the rules—may be a laughable American archetype. But he isn’t drawn as a caricature, as he so easily could have been. (It’s not hard to imagine a version of this as a full-on comedy fronted by, say, Will Forte in man-child mode.) Instead, Cummings keeps Jim grounded and credible, allowing the character’s vulnerability and sweetness to shine through.

Floundering amidst his grief, Jim seems at a loss to help himself as his home life falls apart. His wife (Jocelyn DeBoer) has initiated divorce proceedings, and she’s fighting him for sole custody of their nine-year-old daughter, Crystal (Kendal Farr). Jim yearns to be a better father to Crystal, but there is a fundamental disconnect between the man he is and the man he wants to be. The movie shows us how deeply he loves his daughter, how strenuously he tries to meet her emotional needs, and how often he is incapable of accomplishing this. Since he isn’t equipped to deal with his own emotions, he isn’t equipped to be the parent that his daughter needs him to be.

Thunder Road, then, is as much about being a parent as it is about losing one. As Cummings said in 2018, “It’s about being caught in between the older generation and your children—about the cycle and the legacy of parenting.”

—

I have a memory of myself, at ten years old, driving in a car with my father. It was dusk and we were on a two-lane highway. I don’t remember where we were coming from, I only know we were on our way home. At the time, I didn’t understand why he rarely ever spoke about his own father; for some reason, in that moment, it occurred to me to ask. “Well,” he said quietly, trailing off. “There isn’t much to say.” And there wasn’t, after that. So we didn’t say anything at all.

What I would come to see years later is that, in his reticence, my dad was trying to protect the image I had of my grandfather, whom I looked up to. He didn’t want me to know how distant the old man had been, or how neglected and deprived that emotional distance had made him feel. He didn’t want me to know he had grown up in an unhappy home. He didn’t want me to know what kind of father his father had been.

There were regrets on both sides of the relationship, as there so often are. I know that in his later years, my grandfather wished he had made himself more emotionally available to his kids. We all feel those regrets, as sons and daughters toward our parents, and as parents toward our daughters and sons. (As Jim Arnaud says of his mother, “I gave her hell … and it gets to you … it eats you alive.”)

Of course, as I rode in the car with my dad that night, I did not yet grasp any of this. I remember that a quiet settled over us as we drove. I remember staring out the windshield at the darkening sky. And I still remember the music that came through the speakers when my dad switched on the radio. As the night pressed in against the windows, “Thunder Road” began to play—rippling notes from a harmonica, echoed by a spare, hopeful piano riff. It wasn’t until the singer’s hushed and gravelly baritone filled the car that my father spoke again.

He said, simply, “Bruce Springsteen.”

—

We never find out what the specific issues were that drove the conflicts in Jim Arnaud’s family, but it’s clear he bears a weight of guilt and shame. He largely blames himself for the tensions between his mother and him. He blames himself for not having valued her enough when she was around. And he fears that someday, after he’s gone, his daughter will look back on her relationship with him and feel a similar regret. He instructs Crystal never to say anything “mean” to him—not for his own sake, he clarifies (“I can take it, I’m a grown man”), but because he “would just hate for her to have to look back and…” The sentence hangs unfinished, the thought of his daughter ensnared in some endless cycle of family dysfunction almost too much for Jim to bear.

Above all, he wants to shield Crystal from the family’s troubled history, and he keeps his guard up against this in ways that are not always rational. In one of the movie’s funniest and most touching scenes, he is summoned to her fourth-grade classroom for a talk with her teacher, Mr. Zahn (Macon Blair). As the two men sit facing each other at kid-size desks, Jim is surprised to hear that Crystal is a disruptive force in school, and that she has been teaching her classmates swear words (“Primarily the one where someone pleases a gentleman with their mouth,” as the mild-mannered educator puts it delicately). Until this point in the meeting, Jim has been relatively cool-headed and reasonable, if a bit defensive. But when Mr. Zahn informs him that Crystal has been having “serious reading difficulties,” it triggers a deep emotional response. We know from stray comments Jim has made that he’s dyslexic, and that he is deeply ashamed about it. And so the news that his daughter may have a reading disorder sends him into a tailspin. “You never wanna hear you passed on something terrible to a child,” he laments.

Jim’s dramatic overreaction in this moment is typical of his character: he hoists the tiny desk up over his head and starts pacing around with it, threatening to “hum [it] across the room.” His emotions are so intense, and his capacity to process them so limited, that all he can do at times like these is flail around and make a lot of noise. It’s ridiculous, and it’s sad. (And as the movie never allows us to forget, it can be scary for those on the other end of it; note the moment during Jim’s freakout when Mr. Zahn, visibly rattled, lifts a pair of scissors off a nearby desk and discreetly slides them into his pocket.)

Time and again, Jim’s mental state wavers, but somehow he always manages to face the world smiling. There is something concerning about this relentless positivity, and also something revealing in it. Jim’s determination to keep an upbeat attitude at all times underscores how reluctant he is to acknowledge the truth of things. When his police partner asks if he’s okay after his mother’s funeral, Jim says, “I’ve never been better in my life.” All through the movie, he insists to various people that he is doing great—regardless of how obvious it may be that he is in distress. He can’t bring himself to admit that anything’s wrong. And his stubborn insistence that everything is okay, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, is a textbook case of denial.

Each of us is in some way a reflection of our parents’ illusions, and Jim is no exception. To the extent that he’s in denial about the nature of his problems, the movie implies it’s a trait handed down by his father. Anytime someone asks how he’s doing, Jim’s stock answer is: “See me wrestling an alligator, help the alligator.” The false bravado in this lame mantra points up his toxic positivity. Tellingly, he explains that it’s something his father often said.

When he talks about his mother, Jim describes her in idealized terms. He refers to her as selfless, charitable, full of love. “She was a wonderful mother,” he insists. His characterization of her doesn’t quite add up, though. In his eulogy, he mentions that she had three children and seven grandchildren. The only relatives at the service, however, are Jim and his daughter. The point is not that Jim is lying to the mourners, but that he is, and has been, lying to himself. And, in lying to himself, he’s been suppressing years’ worth of deeply held anger. He begins several times to reckon with the reality of who his mother was, only to resist abandoning his illusions about her. And this ambivalence blocks him from moving through his grief.

When Jim does vent his rage, he makes a public spectacle of himself. Having just lost a custody hearing, he gets into a shouting match with a fellow cop in the parking lot of the police precinct. Things escalate until Jim’s frustration boils over into a spittle-filled rant. Ordered to surrender his badge, he freaks out—“What, you want my pants, too?!”—and angrily strips off his patrolman’s uniform, blustering and bellowing in front of a shocked crowd.

There are echoes of the movie’s opening here. Both scenes feature long speeches conceived around a public breakdown. The crucial difference is that, in this instance, Jim abandons all pretense to his stability. He is not trying to convince anyone that he is “doing great” or that he has “never been better.” On the contrary, he recites a litany of his faults and failures, his grievances and disappointments. He stops trying to hide how broken he is. It’s a moment of total and complete honesty. The character is, quite literally, stripped bare.

From this low point, Jim sets about rebuilding his life. He begins to see that his instincts have led him astray, in part, because he’s been clinging to his illusions. And he starts to realize that, in operating from a place of denial, he hasn’t been allowing himself to process his emotions.

A scene late in the movie serves as another instructive contrast to the opening. On a visit to his mother’s grave, Jim carries on a one-sided conversation with her headstone, and where at the story’s outset he is wild-eyed and discursive, here he is calm and controlled, a changed man under the burden of his grief. He’s come to understand that his mother was a person, flawed and imperfect, and in accepting this fact he has found a way to move on from her death. Throughout the film, he has been unable to cope with the emotional pain of his loss; but now, at last, he has stopped resisting the process of grieving. “If you’re trying to help me,” he says, addressing the stone grave marker, “you don’t have to anymore.”

As he is confronting his bereavement, fate intervenes to provide Jim with a hopeful (if not especially happy) ending. He is stunned to learn that his estranged wife has suddenly died of an overdose, and that he’s the only parent their daughter has left. In the face of one more loss, he has been granted a chance to become the father that his daughter really needs.

He sits Crystal down and tearfully lays out the situation. “I’m gonna be the best dad ever,” he says, and for once he doesn’t sound delusional. He tells her they’re going to leave town and start over someplace new. “I gotta get you out of here. It’s a dead end living here.” And then, all of a sudden, he is struck by the irony of the moment. “Oh God,” he blurts out, remembering “Thunder Road” and what it meant to his mother. “It’s the song!” His daughter stares blankly. “Sorry, honey. Daddy’s realizing he’s had this conversation before. I was about your age,” he tries to explain. “How’d she say it…? I can’t make you leave. You gotta want more for yourself.”

—

On the day of my grandfather’s funeral, after he had been laid to rest, I was riding in a car with my sister. A quiet settled over us as we drove away from the cemetery and wound our way through the area where our father had been raised. I stared out the window and a strange feeling came over me; as if calling me back to my younger self, the passing landscape seemed to remind me of something. It took me a moment to see just what. And then, all at once, I understood.

I flashed on that moment in the car with my father, all those years ago. And I realized the place he grew up in was just the kind of broken-down town that Bruce Springsteen so often sang about: an abandoned manufacturing plant, shuttered storefronts, empty lots overgrown with tall grass, and forlorn houses withered by time. It was the kind of town you’d pull out of if you wanted more for yourself—if you wanted to do something with your life.

Oh God, I thought, with a shiver of recognition. It’s the song.