There’s a moment in Parenthood when Reeves’s dude-bro character, Tod, gives a terrific little speech to his girlfriend’s mom, played by Dianne Wiest. Now, throughout most of the story, Tod is the mom’s enemy, a wannabe man, maybe not so bright, stealing her daughter into adulthood. But then he does his monologue while drinking milk from the carton in her kitchen.
“I guess a boy Garry’s age really needs a man around,” Wiest’s character says, referring to how Tod has become an unlikely father figure for her thirteen-year-old son. “Yeah, well,” Tod says, guzzling milk. He stops, points a pinkie at her: “Depends on the man. I had a man around. He used to wake me up in the morning by flicking lit cigarettes at my head. ‘Hey, asshole! Get up and make me breakfast.’ You know, Mrs. Buckman, you need a license to buy a dog or drive a car. Hell, you need a license to catch a fish. But they’ll let any butt-reaming asshole be a father.”
He gazes off for just a second, snaps to, and looks Wiest right in the eye. Then he shudders and makes a bluurhrh sound, as if he’s shaking off a big insect or a bad memory, and says, “Well, I’m gonna pick up Julie.
“Thirty-two years later, Plimpton remembers it: “That’s him. That little shudder. He added that. That’s his little touch. I thought it was fucking brilliant. It was hilarious. And so him. So dear. So. Dear. I just love that moment in the movie.”
I ask Plimpton if she picked up any bit of wisdom from her time with Keanu, a lesson that’s stuck with her. Without hesitating, she says, “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I think it’s a sense of forgiveness. Of myself.”