‘I watched it endlessly as a teenager’: Why ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’ is my happy movie | Robin Williams

I I can’t think of another movie that touches my heart while making me laugh as reliably as Mrs. Doubtfire does. It has that rare tonal flexibility: genuine sadness, even sadness, followed almost immediately by silliness and welcome comic relief. You may feel a tightness in your throat one minute, and then find yourself laughing out loud the next. Few films manage to do that without being emotionally traumatizing, but this one does so with warmth.

I watched it endlessly as a teenager on videotape on a small TV in my bedroom while wrestling with the ins and outs of my ultimately loving family life. I adored Mrs. Doubtfire for obvious reasons: all the Robin Williams voices, the slapstick comedy and the sheer range of comedic power unleashed by the late actor.

At the time, I didn’t realize what a moving experience it was to watch a film. But rewatching it as an adult, I now know why I keep watching it over and over again. Today we see Williams’ elaborate (and yes, slightly deranged) character Daniel Hillard’s transformation — prosthetic face, breast implants and all — into Britain’s Mrs. Doubtfire, becoming less a silly gag and more a portrait of the lengths a father will go to not to lose his beloved children — a dynamic that used to play out more quietly in my house.

What is even more difficult now is to begin to understand how desperate Daniel is to have his children not taken from him outside of the scheduled few hours on the Sabbath. As a child, his transformation into Mrs. Doubtfire was an elaborate prank. As an adult, it seems less like a farce and more like coercion. When he tells the judge that he is “addicted” to his children and cannot breathe without them, it seems exaggerated. But the truth behind it is raw and human, though often overlooked in favor of mothers’ rights in custody battles today, as it was then.

However, when I watch it now, the film seems more morally complex than I recorded it as a teenager. Daniel is funny, lovable, and messy, but he’s also intrusive and controlling, especially when it comes to his ex-wife’s attempts to move on. Some of the comedy comes from him sabotaging the process, goading her into being her best friend, urging her to take a vow of celibacy and making juvenile jokes at the expense of her new lover Stu Dunmeyer’s (Pierce Brosnan) genitals. In real life, all this would be very unhealthy and strange. However, the film allows Daniel to be flawed and ultimately human — a window into the chaos that accompanies a breakup and the shifting interpersonal dynamics that she learns that come with it.

The film’s ending, not the usual cliched reconciliation, but a gentle reworking of what a family could look like, feels more radical and warming three decades later. Mrs Doubtfire endures because she understands something timeless: families breaking up, changing, rearranging – and lovingly finding their way back home.

When I think about it after my father died three years ago, the film has a whole new look. I’m glad, in hindsight, that my father was always there when I was growing up and that my parents were able to stay together for the sake of the kids, at least until I went to university. Just like Daniel, my father needed us. My brother and I were his best friends, and we needed him too. I think about him often, and part of me wishes I could live my childhood again, safe in the happy confines of his car during long trips to and from football matches.

After my breakups as an adult, including one in which I was forced to watch my ex-girlfriend move on with another man in real time, I can also begin to understand how powerful that must have been for Daniel – as I watch Miranda Hillard (Sally Field) fawn over days and weeks by handsome Stu. All the while, Mrs. Doubtfire has a little seat while he cooks and cleans, almost repaying a karmic debt because apparently Daniel should have helped out more often with the housework during his ill-fated marriage.

When Daniel gets drunk during the film’s climactic scene at a now-famous San Francisco restaurant and drinks Stu’s jambalaya with chili peppers in a moment of drunken rush, many men will be able to relate to the nervous system spike and ego slap that can come with seeing a recent ex-lover kissing another man. This is not to say that violence can ever be justified, and when Daniel grants his love rival Stu, who is allergic to pepper, a potentially life-saving Heimlich maneuver, the redemptive moral arc is complete.

As a 32-year-old man, I have my own dreams of meeting my future wife and having three beautiful children like Danielle and Miranda, or even more. If Mrs. Doubtfire had any lessons for me, it was to be a gourmet cook, disciplined, and clean-obsessed from the start, and not to learn such traits almost as soon as it was too late.