Who is My Father?

Amanda Bynes and Kelly Preston.

Why didn’t you tell me I am a father?

In the movie, What A Girl Wants, Kelly Preston played Libby an American woman who married Henry (Colin Firth), an English aristocrat. His mother did not like Libby and chased her away.

She went back to the U.S. and never told her husband that she was pregnant. Seventeen years later their daughter, Daphne (Amanda Bynes) flies to England to look for her father.

The movie is fiction. In real life, women have reasons why they don’t tell men they are pregnant.

1. They don’t want to be accused of forcing men into marriage.

2. Men might have expressed that they don’t want kids.

3. Men are already married.

4. Class differences. Families would not have approved e.g. What A Girl Wants.

5. It was a one night stand.

6. They don’t love the man.

7. They are realistic enough to know that the two personalities will never jell.

8. They might have wanted a baby to call their own, without the extra work, which is marriage.

I thought about doing a movie review when Meghan Markle and Prince Harry tied the knot on 19 May, 2018. There are similarities in What a Girl Wants and Meghan Markle’s life: being American, relatively ‘poor’ family upbringing, absentee fathers and the British royalty angle, complete with castles in both the movie and Prince Harry’s case.

I found the DVD in a music store but was reluctant to buy it because Hollywood and British movies are so predictable. The first few frames showed Daphne scaling a castle wall while Henry her father has breakfast with his family and girlfriend.

Resemblance. Actress Meryl Streep and daughter Mami Gummer.

I sighed. See why I don’t watch these movies? Patience. Good thing I was patient because I heard lovely lines. Family members were appalled obviously, when Daphne produced a photo of her father and a birth certificate. Impostor, was the general chorus, but Henry believed her.

‘She has a birth certificate and she has my eyes.’

I find that so endearing. She has my eyes. So sweet! Maybe it’s because that is all I ever heard growing up. ‘You look so much like your father,’ and people said it in awe. I do look like him, don’t I? 

I ended up enjoying the movie with its predictable scenes: pushing someone into the pool; stuffy British debutantes looking down upon Daphne because she’s American; Henry (Colin Firth) flying to America to find Libby (Kelly Preston) the love of his teenage years and the mother of his child.

By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.