He has refused to accept conventional wisdom regarding the Bush family and the failed son they made president.
Was I going to fail my son because of my ignorance?
The transmission of that covenant, though, is tenuous: wives don't conceive, husbands don't acknowledge wives, sons unman their fathers, fathers fail their sons; primogeniture is overturned.
When those methods fail, his son-in-law, Benny (an unsettlingly calm Paul Murillo), takes matters into his own hands.
When the upcountry harvests fail, the sons and daughters of rice farmers' arrive here, bleary-eyed, on the overnight trains, to be swept up by those seeking cleaners for hotels, drivers for taxis, girls for massage parlours, hostesses for bars.
"The Good Shepherd" is an origin story about the C.I.A., and for the filmmakers that story boils down to fathers who fail their sons, a suspect metaphor that here becomes all too ploddingly literal.
When Sherry (the fantastic Liza Colón-Zayas), a health-care worker who loves what she does, loves the people involved, objects to another health-care worker's shoddy treatment of Mary Jane's son, Mary Jane makes excuses because she knows how fallible other people are; hasn't she failed her son by not making him whole and well?
"I felt I had failed my son.
"I don't say I failed my son.
"I don't say the schools failed my son," she says softly.
"I felt like I was duped by Xytex and I failed my son for having chosen Xytex.
