Sr. (2022)

Summary

As Robert Downey Jr attempts to make a documentary about the life and work of his avant-garde filmmaker father, Downey Sr. has his own ideas about what their final project should be.

Director

Chris Smith

Downey Factor

High, the focus is on him and his father.

Character

Himself

Looks

Normal,

Performance

Although he plays along with some his father's wacky ideas, most of the time he's just being himself, interacting with his family and trying to keep the storytelling on track

Line

It's no mystery that Paul Thomas Anderson is probably the son my father wishes he had had, and they like to rub that in my face.

Love & Sex

His wife Susan appears in a few scenes

Cast

Robert Downey Sr., Alan Arkin, Norman Lear, Sean Hayes

Connection

Robert Downey Sr's Hugo Pool, Pound, Up the Academy, Rented Lips, America, Too Much Sun, Greaser's Palace and Moment to Moment and in The Last Party and Johnny Be Good.

Alan Arkin in Eros.

RDJ Says

My dad was passing away, and as an avoidance mechanism, I decided to send crews over and get his thoughts on his winter years, and that turned into Sr. probably the most important thing I will ever do, which was being able to become part object and subject within a piece of “content.” Which is what it was, but to me it was meaningful ... I wouldn’t say [director] Chris [Smith] was happy that it went this way but it’s much more like real life. We don’t get the answers we want when we want them. This is not a Disney+ thing going on here. This is a real life. Things are inconclusive. Things are unfinished. There’s a lot of uncertainty and you have to make peace with that ... I guess we’re always just trying to figure out how to balance ourselves. It’s rare that any parent gets it right. Senior was an example of somebody who got it about as wrong as you could ... We had no overt agenda with this project. I had a sense of what it might be and I knew that part of it was always going to be the end of his life. Is it a father-son story? I don't think so. Is it a story about what is it to be an artist? I don't know, maybe. Is it a contemplation of death? I think it's kind of turning into that. And not in a morose way, but just in a—we're here, we do stuff and we're gone ... It started off as kind of a pre-pandemic and then into the pandemic, for me, I'll be honest it was an avoidance technique. I knew that he was in the throes of Parkinson's which is an awful disease and I'm not great at confront inevitabilities always. It's almost like it was this journey for me to, in my mid-50s, kind of like, grow up and take responsibility and take responsibility for framing how I experienced my childhood and how I reacted to that parent as he was in the last years of his life ... Anyone who sees Sr., it can be a tough watch but I would suggest that you find your way though it ... There was a certain point where my dad made these very avant-garde movies and they didn't always even seem like they had a plot. We had amassed all this footage in Sr. and Susan came to me and she was like, "You can't make this documentary like one of your dad's movies, this has to have an act one, two and three." And I was like, well, what's act three? Act Three ended up being his passing and us kind of figuring out a way to ingest that and make sense of that ... I even said to [my father] at several junctures when we needed a bit of gallows humor, “Dad, Act 3 doesn’t work until you bite the dust,” and he said, “Hey, don’t rush me. I’m working here.” ... It was a surreal experience. And I think there was the grieving part of it. I think it's why some people say, "I wish I had been able to do something like this for one of my parents or a loved one" is that it becomes this kind of a touchstone and it's a way to have a mechanism by which you can process a loss. So, I'm super fortunate to have it there and I think it'll be something that I use as a bit of a self-help tool for years to come.

Time & Place

New York City and the Hamptons, 2019-21

Availability

Released on Netflix December 2, 2022

Rotten Tomatoes

97% fresh | 59 reviews

Critical View

G. Allen Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle: The great absurdist filmmaker Robert Downey Sr. and his movie star son Robert Downey Jr. bare their souls. Set during the waning days of Sr.’s life ... the movie is about regret and loss, anger and forgiveness, and finally, acceptance and love.

Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly: Certain bits feel more like family therapy than filmmaking (one scene actually is just a distraught Jr. zooming with his therapist). Still, there's something lovely and quietly profound about where the film finds itself in the end: a generational love story that transcends old wounds and misadventures, and even, in its tender final moments, death itself.

John Nugent, Empire: Jr wears his heart on his sleeve, dreamy and nostalgic about growing up on film sets, while remaining level-headed about his dad’s permissiveness with drink and drugs from a young age. Sr, meanwhile, retains a sprightly rebelliousness to the end, and there’s an element of cat-and-mouse in the son’s chase to learn more about his old man, to penetrate his puckish exterior. The result is more interesting and unusual than you might expect from such a personal, navel-gazey project.

2 Reasons to See It

1. Lots of footage and photos from Robert Downey Jr's childhood.
2. So you can understand the part of Robert Downey Jr's Oscar acceptance speech where he thanked his "terrible childhood."

Overall

While this isn't the first documentary that Robert Downey Jr has been at the center of (and his father does, to a lesser extent appear in the other one), Sr. is a much more raw and grown-up project that helps you better understand how and why he is who he is. A must-see.

If You Liked It

You may also like The Last Party

Photos

Video