Stellan Skarsgård and Renate Reinsve in Sentimental Value.Kasper Tuxen/Elevation Pictures/Supplied
Jennifer McGuire is a writer, essayist and author of the memoir Nest: Letting Go from Italy, France, and Ireland.
Stellan Skarsgard is not my father. I am a 53-year-old woman, a mother of four, and still, I need to remind myself that he is acting in Sentimental Value, the Oscar-nominated film about two sisters reconnecting with their estranged father after their mother’s death. That he is not really Gustav Borg, that he did not abandon his daughters after his divorce to go make movies. That these are not his daughters at all. He is not my father and I am a woman grown and I should not feel that old familiar wound break wide open. This wound I tell myself scabbed over long ago. I should eat my popcorn. I should prepare my banal observations for cocktails after the movie.
The performances. The cinematography. Elle Fanning. Marvelous!
Stellan Skarsgard is not my father, but of course, as always, he might as well be. And that old wound bleeds fresh.
My father, whose name is Bob or Rob or Robert, has dedicated most of his adult life to pretending I was never born. He is hidden, avoiding social media and cutting out family members who have lightly noted my existence. I wonder sometimes if I have loomed larger for him in my own absence than I might have otherwise. He has loomed larger than I would like in mine. I recognized this in Nora and Agnes, Gustav’s forgotten daughters in Sentimental Value. Their faux disinterest in his life even as they watch for him always. Even as he brushes aside his decades of absence. Even as he tries to neatly step back into the picture. Even as he writes a movie to explain himself, to find his way back to being loved by them again.
Sentimental Value examines what’s required for actors to play actors
“It’s different,” my mother reminds me after when I tell her about the movie. “Your father never wanted to see you.”
She is right and this is old news to me and to us but still. The knife twists.
Bob or Rob or Robert decided against me when Moon Boots were popular the first time around, when houses in our town cost about $10,000, when Tim Horton was more hockey player than apple fritter. He did not know me then. I was not born. I grew into a toddler outside of my mother without him knowing me. I became a girl and then a woman and then a mom and then all of this after without him knowing me. His absence has perhaps been the most constant fact of my life, more than my changeable brown hair or my eyes or the size of my hips. His absence is a tattoo I did not ask for or design. A coat I am forced to wear regardless of the season. A qualifier no one wants to hear unless I’ve done something unacceptable that requires an explanation.
Her father left before she was born, a critic might say and their audience might nod and say, Ah. That explains everything.
It still shocks me, how long I’ve been a fatherless daughter. The boring constancy of it. How it didn’t just end when I became an adult. When I stopped writing him desperate letters in my journals as a girl. “Dear Dad,” I’d write and then cross it out, embarrassed at the unearned familiarity even alone in my room. Dear Sir? Surely not. To Whom It May Concern perhaps, but as we’ve established, I do not concern him.
I am a woman with lines on my face now. Age spots on my hand. It is too late for that girl to meet her father.
His loss, I tell myself when I think of him at all. Especially when I look at my four sons, all big and strong with smiles like mine and maybe like my father’s, who knows? Who could know?
Grandsons he does not know. Already older than the boy he was when he left.
I do wonder now about that boy more than the man I’ve invented as I watch Sentimental Value. Just 20 years old when I was born. The tenderness of my own boys at that age superimposed over his shadowy face. The son of an overbearing father and a frightened mother, according to local lore. A lost child himself, perhaps. A boy who made a bad decision and didn’t know how to stop making that decision until it became part of his own DNA. Until my absence became a coat he wore in every season.
I wonder if Bob or Rob or Robert is like Gustav. A man grown from a broken little boy, defined by the women who have left him and the women he has left. I wonder if he is afraid of meeting me or never meeting me. I wonder if he thinks of his own mother, a forgotten daughter herself, a woman who wanted to meet me. I wonder if he feels just so sorry: for her, for me, for himself. But sometimes a sorry becomes too big for any mouth to say.
He is a man in his 70s now or he is dead now, who could know? I might never know. There might not be a third act for us. We might have already faded to black in our version of the movie. I don’t know what my hope is for us any more. I don’t know if I would like to meet or never meet.
I think I hope I can forgive him. I think I hope he can forgive himself.
And I think I want to take this coat off now.