Daddy cool

'The dad' is a role that many stars want to play. He's cute and caring, and in touch with his feminine side. But, asks Ryan Gilbey, why must 'the mum' always be the villain?

Once an actor has proved beyond doubt that he can be tough or funny or sexy, it's only a matter of time before he pairs up with a wisecracking kid, or a gurgling baby, to capitalise on his previously unexplored sensitive side. It should be remembered that an actor is a commodity not so very different from a 4x4: if he isn't equipped to negotiate a variety of terrains then audiences will quickly tire of him and switch to a more versatile model.

One such performer is Eddie Murphy, who will shortly be seen in Daddy Day Care surrounded by co-stars whose previous biggest achievements before appearing in a Hollywood movie included eating all their broccoli, and getting through the night without wetting the bed. Murphy has been aiming at the family audience for some years now, ever since his penchant for profanities ceased to be cute. With movies such as Dr Dolittle, and voice work in Mulan and Shrek, Murphy has effectively washed out his mouth with soap. As with Steve Martin and Robin Williams before him, he has repackaged himself as a wholesome alternative to his own formerly abrasive persona. A contrite Eddie Murphy is something like a chaste Sharon Stone, which may be why his new family-oriented films seem in some way to go against nature.

In Daddy Day Care, Murphy plays a recently-sacked executive who starts up a day-care centre. Soon parents are removing their offspring from the austere local establishment presided over by a Nurse Ratched-style headmistress (Anjelica Huston) and enrolling them in his nursery, where anarchy and freedom of expression are the order of the day. Quite apart from the invidious distinction that the film draws between education (the pupils at Huston's centre are taught science and foreign languages) and expression, as though the former automatically precluded the latter, it is worrying that once again a father's supremacy can only be asserted at the cost of his female counterpart.

Admittedly, the mother gets off lightly in Daddy Day Care. Other movies that promote the bond between father and child commonly cast the mother as villainous (Problem Child), expendable (Road to Perdition) or idealised by absence (Sleepless in Seattle). But the makers of Daddy Day Care have still deemed it necessary to pit their hero against a woman, thereby drawing him into a struggle against conservative gender roles that is rendered in exclusively reactionary terms. Murphy's triumph can only come at the expense of Huston. What her character has presumably spent years learning in training colleges and work placements, Murphy has trumped simply through intuition.

The hostility toward the female emerged after a period in which film-makers seemed confused about where the balance of power should reside. Kramer vs Kramer, from 1979, was a watershed in its portrayal of fatherhood. The movie's emphasis on the father, played by Dustin Hoffman, who is forced to care for his young son when the boy's mother (Meryl Streep) walks out, positions him as our single point of empathy. His flaws, lovingly quantified by the film, make him the more receptive parent, in stark contrast to the mother's businesslike demeanour. The punchline is that Streep finally allows Hoffman to keep the child after a custody hearing that ends in her favour. The unpredictability that caused her to leave in the first place, and to return unannounced with her roster of demands, has restored order in the final scene. But it's an unsettled kind of calm. The mother is not so much demonised as decontextualised. A harridan could be more easily processed, and booed at. A mother in turmoil is a more amorphous prospect. By allowing each of the film's three acts to hinge on her whims, and by removing the father's power at home and in the office, the movie evokes an atmosphere of uncertainty that still lingers.

It also helps to explain why films such as Daddy Day Care and Big Daddy bristle a suspicion of the female's motives. Part of the problem must also be the biological ambiguity of the parenting process. In Three Men and a Baby and Fathers' Day, there can be numerous candidates for paternity, but for obvious reasons only one mother. This creates a situation where men become oddly feminised without paternity to take for granted; in Fathers' Day, there is even a tasteless scene in which a teenage boy's two possible fathers (Robin Williams and Billy Crystal) are assumed by a bellboy to be molesting "their" son, whom they are merely trying to rouse from unconsciousness. This episode, played for laughs that never come, may in fact be an equal of that moment of confusion at the end of Kramer vs Kramer. When a man can't even be certain whether or not he has qualified for the role of father, then all other roles and responsibilities go into freefall.

Where fatherhood, actual or symbolic, is undisputed, it is chiefly employed to tame an unstable persona, as with Hugh Grant in Nine Months, Notting Hill and About a Boy, or Nicolas Cage in The Family Man. For Murphy, the taming is complete; he's fully house-trained. His next film after Daddy Day Care is The Haunted Mansion, another comedy engineered to endorse the lifestyle choices of its target audience - namely the family. In this picture, Murphy plays a workaholic father, a character type frequently invoked to illustrate the shortcomings of modern parenting. Films such as Liar Liar and Jingle All the Way are able to continue reviving the narrative pattern of an inattentive father who is tutored to love his children, because this is the subject that occupies studio executives in the downtime between meetings. These men commonly compensate for the lack of quality time spent with their children by greenlighting pictures that exhort other men to spend more quality time with their children.

There must be an entire generation of emotionally neglected sons and daughters of LA studio brass, whose only evidence that Daddy knows they exist is the appearance of another guilt-ridden film in which Jim Carrey or Eddie Murphy learns to play catch in the back-yard. The ultimate revenge would be if one of these brats was to grow up and give the go-ahead to a remake of Eraserhead, David Lynch's Surrealist nightmare inspired by the birth of his own daughter, in which a father ends up murdering the gurning infant who starts squealing every time he tries to leave the house. I see Robin Williams in the lead.

'Daddy Day Care' is out on 11 July