Stream It or Skip It?

The Son of a Thousand Men (now on Netflix) is set in a place out of time. It could be now or it could be 60 years ago and that seems to be the point – people are people no matter when or where they exist. Director Daniel Rezende adapts Valter Hugo Mae’s novel of the same name, about lost and lonely souls who find a little bit of happiness as a makeshift family living in a tiny coastal village in Brazil. Rodrigo Santoro (of 300 and TV series Lost and Westworld) headlines this sprawling borderline-magical-realist tale asserting that love is all we need – but do we need a little bit more than that flimsy affirmation? Yeah, maybe.

The Gist: These people, they live under a rock. No, really. It’s a gorgeous Hobbit-like home built into a massive overhanging slab of shale somewhere along the coast of Brazil. That’s where Camilo (Miguel Martines) is found, crouched in a corner, eating cans of tuna, his grandfather long dead in his chair. Next, we meet a middle-aged man who looks like he’s never owned a pair or shoes. He’s Crisostomo (Rodrigo Santoro). He too lives by the sea. He’s a fisherman. He barely ever speaks. He catches and cooks and eats his own dinner in a rugged blue shack near a postcard snatch of beach. He’s been alone for god knows how long. There are no doors on his house, but he lets no people in. Thankfully, we have some voiceover narration to explain why he’s Geppetto to a lifesize doll, a boy, with a permanent smile on its face composed of eight red buttons: Crisostomo has always dreamt of being a father, but it never happened. Will this do? This doll? Which he embraces longingly? Likely not. But we’ve been privy to the opening scene with a newly orphaned boy. 

One of the first things Camilo shares with Crisostomo is how he never knew his mother. We get to meet her in a flashback, though – Francisca (Juliana Caldas) is a little person, a frequent target of condescension by others in the village. A group of catty ladies are shocked to learn Francisca’s pregnant because it means someone ACTUALLY had sex with her. She doesn’t survive the birth, though. CUT TO: Antonino (Johnny Massaro), a teenager who often comes home with bruises and black eyes. He likes to draw. He’s bullied. He’s gay. His mother Matilde (Inez Viana) always sniffs his neck, apparently to see if he’s been canoodling with another man. She does not approve. Soon enough, we see him standing at the altar next to a veiled woman, his eyes welling up. I probably don’t need to say this, but Matilde made the wedding happen.

We meet that bride in the next segment: Isaura (Rebeca Jamir as an adult, Livia Silva as a teen). Her mother Marta (Grace Passo) is a wackjob who woke up one day with a French accent and believes she can make it go away by drinking perfume or (get this) eating dung. Young Isaura defies her mother’s wishes and has sex with her boyfriend, and Marta flips out. Marta’s solution is to marry Isaura off to the local “sissy,” to assure no one ever touches her again. The day after the wedding, the night of which was utterly uneventful, Isaura walks to the beach and perches on a rock near a familiar blue shack. Kismet: She meets Crisostomo, who at last says more than a half-dozen words in a row. All these lonely people. All they need is… what? A safe space? A nonjudgmental eye pointed at them? Or that thing the Beatles sang about? They’ll take the combo platter, please.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The Son of a Thousand Men gently unearths a trend from a couple decades back: movies with an array of characters whose stories intersect, a la Amores Perros or Babel. Oh, and gawd help me if there weren’t a few shots of Santoro and the doll that conjured up Lars and the Real Girl.

Performance Worth Watching: I was most taken by Jamir’s work, which is a little more complex than her castmates’, as it tends to lean away from the story’s hokier, sentimental simplicities. 

Sex And Skin: Some full-frontal dong, a long shot of a naked lady swimming in the ocean, an overstylized non-graphic sex scene.

Our Take: Rezende really strains for profundity in nearly every moment of The Son of a Thousand Men. The cast members move and interact with slow, intentional, purposeful movements. The camera lingers on gorgeous compositions of natural beauty, often with a person situated somewhere in the shot. The strings on the score swell deliberately. Dialogue is often sparse. The narration is overwrought, e.g., “The girl felt like a tiny atom in the invisibility of the air.” If the director’s goal is to conjure feelings of loneliness, tentativeness, hesitation and reluctance by the metric ton, consider it met.

Some may take issue with the plodding nature of the narrative. It hops from one story to the next, introduced with chapter headings, and offers up a variety of characters who come together one by one until they form a makeshift “found” family. It moves glacially, and that’s intentional, creating a sense of immersion in this world that seems outside our own world, flecked with flights of fanciful magical realism (we watch light sparking from Crisostomo’s belly as he lies on the beach at night; either that, or we’re privy to his very vivid dreams), time passing slowly without the intrusion of any elements of pragmatic society, like TV or radio, or even a single mention of things like jobs or cars. 

These are very deliberate decisions by Rezende, who tries incredibly hard to create poetic imagery within a complex literary narrative framework. The film is at times quite beautiful, but the interwoven drama and overlapping character arcs are leached of subtlety and humor: Santoro’s take on a slightly stunted man is wrought with cornball sincerity, and a thematic emphasis on the stupidities of prejudice is simplistic, enforcing the notion that such ideas are passed on from previous generations like a soup recipe. Happiness is elusive for so many, and it’s sweet to experience a story in which people, hodgepodged together by circumstance, grab handfuls of it like sand, and appreciate it before it slips through their fingers. The film has sincere intentions, but it also feels simultaneously underbaked and overcooked.

Our Call: A bevy of nice, gently cheesy moments may endear you to The Son of a Thousand Men, but its slow, two-hour plod to a no-shit-Sherlock thematic conclusion pushes it to SKIP IT status.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.