COMM 324 Film Analysis for Cheaper by the Dozen PDF

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Summary

Film Analysis for Dr. Marrow Family Communication class. This analysis was done on the movie Cheaper By the Dozen....

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I chose to watch the film “Cheaper by the Dozen”. Tom Baker and his wife Kate have raised their twelve children in Midland, Illinois, but when Tom accepts an offer from friend and teammate Shake McGuire to coach at his alma mater he moves his family to his hometown of Evanston, Illinois. The kids are against the move and unwilling to leave their friends in Midland. The atmosphere at the Bakers' new house is tense, and both Mark and Charlie are bullied at school. Kate receives a call from her publisher that her book is going to be published and has to go on a book tour. She worries about leaving Tom on his own to take care of the kids but he tells her he can handle it and convinces her to go. Tom hires their eldest child, Nora, and her self-absorbed boyfriend, Hank, to help look after the kids while Kate is gone. The kids decide to sabotage this plan and trip Hank into a pool of dirty water and, while he showers, soak his underwear with meat juices. At lunch the children unleash Gunner their dog onto him. He refuses to assist babysitting and drives away with Nora. Tom punishes the children by cutting off their allowance for a month. After a chaotic night, Tom realizes he cannot handle the children alone. Tom tries to hire help and calls every ad in the phone book, but no one is willing to work with such a large family. Tom decides to bring the football team from work to practice in the living room for Saturday night's football game as the kids do their chores and homework. Some of the kids get into an altercation with Mark's bullies that knocked off his glasses. When frustrated and homesick Charlie is kicked off the football team, he accuses Tom of moving the family for his own selfish reasons. Kate gets a message from the kids about the chaos at home and cancels the rest of her book tour. Her publisher decides to create an additional promotion by having Oprah Winfrey interview the Bakers in their home. Despite Kate's efforts, the Bakers are unable to recreate the loving, strongly bonded family she described in her book. When Mark's frog dies Sarah tells him nobody cares, causing a heated fight to erupt moments before filming starts, leading it to be canceled. Mark runs away from home. Hank refuses to help search for Mark, and Nora realizes the kids were right about

him and breaks up with him and joins the search, reminding Tom how she used to run away from home to Chicago. Tom has a hunch that Mark is heading for their old home, and finds him on a train to Midland. Reunited, the Bakers begin to address their issues with each other, and Tom resigns his position to spend more time with his family. I’m not sure that the Baker family would be considered evotypical. The book defines evotypical families as “kinship ties bound together by the desire of caring for one another with the common goal of surviving as a single small group unit”. I believe that the Baker family in this movie still has a traditional family structure. They have two heterosexual parents and twelve children all blood related. An evotypical family is one that does not follow the traditional idea of a family. The term evotypical could be used to describe a family comprised of a same-sex couple and adopted children or even a divorced person who remarries and still coparents with their previous spouse and etc. From what I observed in this movie the Baker family is still what people might consider a traditional family. The only thing that might be considered unusual would be the number of children, but the fact that they are all blood related still prevents them from being considered evotypical. The chapter I thought best relates to this film is Chapter 7 “Decision Making in DualCareer Couples: A Replication and Extension”. In the beginning of this movie it shows that both Tom and Kate had been working full time, but when they started having more kids Kate quit her job and stayed home with the kids. It seems that she had been working on a book about her family for a while and finally finished and sent it to her publisher friend. Later in the movie Kate gets the call from her publisher that her book is going to be published and decides to go on the book tour. The book states that there is insufficient research when it comes to decision making between couples since genuine egalitarianism in dual-career couples is rare. The decisions that were relevant in this movie were first the initial move at the beginning, then the decision for Kate to go on her book tour, and finally for Tom to resign his position to spend more time with his family. Something I would have liked to see more in this movie would have been financial

decisions. Since they are such a large family it would have been beneficial to see how they managed their finances. The only thing I really see in the movie regarding their finances is the fact that the kids wear mostly hand-me-downs since they probably couldn’t afford to buy all their kids brand new clothes. I think communication throughout this movie was very negatively depicted. For a majority of the movie Kate was gone on her book tour and Tom was left on his own to try and take care of all the kids. The communication was very poor and the family didn’t really have an effective way of communicating with each other. Tom was always working and was barely at home, and he struggled to understand what was happening with them at school and even when he was home he was working on his game plans. When he was talking to Kate over the phone he lied to her and told her he had everything under control instead of being honest about him struggling to keep everything together. There wasn’t any part in the movie where the family tried to improve their communication. Throughout the movie all the family members were frustrated and constantly on each other’s case. The few times the kids did voice their frustrations to their dad he just dismissed them. Communication played a huge role in the way this family functioned. If this family would have had better communication, perhaps there wouldn’t have been so many issues while their mom was gone. Although Tom was busy with his job as well as dealing with his family at home, he still could have made an effort to better communicate with his kids, even if it was just one family meeting a week to discuss chores and other things happening in their lives. I think they could have found a better way to communicate while they were a long distance away from each other. They could have planned a nightly phone call with Kate before the kids went to bed so they could have talked to their mom, and it might have helped manage the stress all the kids and Tom were trying to manage. I have mixed feelings about the ending of this movie. They don’t really address the communication issues and everything just seems to go back to normal. The only thing the ending of the movie addressed was that Tom figured out a way to make his career work while

still finding the time to be with his family. If I were to rewrite the ending to this movie I would have liked to include some indication that the family improved their communication such as attending family counseling. The way this ending was written implies that as soon as Kate came back from her book tour everything pretty much went back to normal. I understood this as the writers saying that the Baker family was unable to function properly without their mother at home....