Harvey Keitel is Your Daddy
A celebration of fatherhood in a movie full of vampires
From Dusk Till Dawn is a lot of things all at once: tense crime thriller, pay cable nudie flick, over-the-top vampire action gore-fest… and one of the best filmic depictions of fatherhood ever committed to screen.
Huh?
Harvey Keitel plays Jacob Fuller, a minister and father to Scott (Ernest Liu) and Katherine (Juliette Lewis). After a freak car wreck kills his wife, Jacob takes his kids on a road trip across the country in an RV, hoping to take their minds off the trouble and get away for a while. While rambling through Texas, the three are taken hostage by the criminal Gecko brothers, and forced to smuggle them across the Mexico border.
From there, they enter a strip club full of vampires and have to try and survive until dawn. The film’s a criminally (and critically) underrated effort written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Robert Rodriguez, and one of the most interesting aspects is this character of Jacob. In the middle of all the blood, fangs, guns, and nudity, the movie features this phenomenal, caring, three-dimensional dad.
Jacob just wants the best for his family, and he’s trying to create a diversion and distraction for his kids in the form of a fun road trip. By attempting to completely remove them from the life they know, he hopes to sever the painful memories they now associate with their normal life. Of course, the fact that it all goes to hell in the most fantastic way possible shouldn’t be held against him… he was only trying to do his best.
When the shit truly hits the fan, and hordes of vampires storm into the strip club (into which the Gecko brothers have forced Jacob and his family to get a drink) Jacob proves a capable and resourceful protector of his clan. This is fatherhood without reservation, this is a character whose defining characteristic is: Dad. Even Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer had to warm up to the idea of being a great dad. For Keitel’s Jacob, he knows how to protect his brood from the very start. His major flaw, in fact, has nothing to do with his kids… he’s lost his faith and no longer wants to be a pastor after the horrible death of his wife. But he’s still dad, doing what he needs to do, and making terrible sacrifices along the way.
Keitel’s acting is, as always, incredible. He combines a warmth toward his children with pastor-ly calm and patience, but seething under all of that is a performance informed by doubt. In an interview shortly after the release of the film George Clooney remarked on working with him, “I was scared to death. I had to work with Harvey Keitel, and my character was supposed to dominate him. Now, nobody but nobody dominates Harvey on screen. I did my best, but when I look at the result, I can see him throw in a gesture, raise an eyebrow, or even take a pause, and he takes focus. That’s why he’s Harvey Keitel, and I’m just a lucky guy with the best job in the world.”
If you haven’t yet seen From Dusk Till Dawn, check it out with Dad this Father’s Day (unless you all can’t handle watching a very Rated R movie together) and see what we’re talking about.
What do you think? Is Harvey Keitel as Jacob the best on-screen portrayal of a dad in an action film?
Click above to stream From Dusk Till Dawn now on Tribeca Shortlist with a FREE trial.
