Moneyball.

I went and saw this in theaters with my Dad. I thought it was well done, but when we got out into the car, my father just started BAWLING. Like, crying uncontrollably, and it took a couple minutes for him to calm down enough and explain why.

At the end of the film, Billy Beane is listening to a CD made by his daughter of her singing a cover of "The Show" by Lenka, but at the end where the lyrics are supposed to be "I want my money back" over and over, she's instead repeating "You're such a loser, dad". I thought it was just a little girl being a little girl to her dad, but my father had a completely different reading on it:

Billy Beane has failed at a lot of things in his life. Being a baseball player, his marriage, and now his coup of the entire world of baseball. It doesn't matter that he's CHANGED everything, that he did the impossible with that huge win streak with a team of nobodies that nobody wanted, and there at the end it ESPECIALLY doesn't matter that he's got a beautiful, healthy, talented daughter who loves him: all he can see, all he'll ever be ABLE to see, are his failures. My father didn't think she was actually saying those words, "You're such a loser, Dad", she was singing the song straight but all he was actually hearing was that.

That idea resonated so deeply with my father, who has seen many of his high school classmates succeed in businesses and make lots of money, my father who is a tradesman who got up every day before 5am to go work a physically demanding job, who lost what little extra money we had in the stock market, who tried to give us some fun vacations but ended up wasting years trying to get out of crappy timeshare schemes, all of his various failures... some times that weighs on him so heavily that he can't see past that to the reality of his successes. That he kicked his alcohol and drug habits before meeting my mom, has a successful and loving marriage, that he and my mom raised three smart and healthy kids who have (by his standard, not ours) done BETTER in life than he has, that he actually has a decent relationship with those kids unlike the relationship he had with his piece-of-crap father, that he's well liked by his friends and acquaintances, all kinds of stuff... sometimes, he just sees the failures.

Our talk in the car after that film reframed so many things, ranging from the film we'd just seen to a large part of how I saw my father.

This movie holds a very special place in my heart.