The MCU does justice to estranged daughters in ‘Captain America: Brave New World’
From Tony and Morgan Stark to Gamora and Thanos, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is filled with exemplary or unrealistic father-daughter relationships, but Captain America: Brave New World is the first movie I feel really does justice to the estranged daughter experience.
Mild spoilers for Captain America: Brave New World ahead!
As a daughter who is going on four years of no contact with my one living parent, it’s hard to feel seen when it comes to film and television. For example, the MCU’s prior examples of family estrangement weren’t quite realistic. We have Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and his estranged daughter Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), who predictably make up by the end of their first movie together. Then, there’s Thanos (Josh Brolin) and Gamora (Zoe Saldaña), where estrangement is honestly an understatement since we’re dealing with a genocidal alien who killed his daughter’s family before adopting her. It’s so rare to have a movie that isn’t fixated on that swift, uncomplicated reunion or doesn’t make us feel like we must have unfathomably evil parents for our experiences to be worth making movies about. Hence, I was glad that Captain America: Brave New World gave us Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford). Sure, he’s the President of the United States in the film, but it establishes that he’s also just your run-of-the-mill lousy parent, and the realism doesn’t end there.
Captain America: Brave New World does family estrangement right
In Captain America: Brave New World, Ross is a main character for the first time since The Incredible Hulk, so viewers get to see a bit of his personal life. They learn that he’s still estranged from his daughter, Betty Ross (Liv Tyler), who, understandably, cut him off after he obsessively tried to hunt down and weaponize her ex-boyfriend Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) and did a bunch more shady, corrupt things involving the Avengers and Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson). However, Ross manages to prove he’s still human as he expresses grief and regret over the idea that Betty will likely never speak to him again.
At one point, he breaks down at the gravesite of his late wife, Karen, as he confides in her the fact that he believes he’ll never have a second chance to prove to Betty that he has changed. What I liked about Captain America: Brave New World is that it never frames Ross as someone who should be pitied. After all, much of the movie is about one of his schemes blowing up in his face and him letting an innocent man take the fall for it. So, when he cries about his lost relationship with his daughter and how she won’t believe he’s changed, the audience pities her because she’s clearly right: her father is a bad person who hasn’t changed.
His tears don’t evoke pity but satisfaction. Here’s a man who has gotten everything he could possibly want in life, but even as President, he can’t make his daughter forgive him. I know there are so many moments when those of us who have gone no contact question if our parents are even human enough to care. Heck, I’ve wondered if mine has even noticed yet. So, I loved the idea that even becoming the most powerful person in the country can’t fill the void left in someone whose child has stopped speaking to them.
Maybe Thaddeus Ross will strike a chord with parents, too
The other reason Captain America: Brave New World‘s estrangement storyline works is that it’s not predictable. Throughout much of the movie, I kept expecting Betty to appear. I thought she and her father would be forced together in some dangerous adventure that would inevitably bring them together or that she’d be the one to bring him back when he turned into the Red Hulk. At one point, he talks of wanting to relive a moment with his daughter when they visited the cherry blossoms. I thought surely the movie was building up for a reunion at those cherry blossoms. However, it never happens. He is the sole individual responsible for remembering his humanity and pulling himself out of a destructive and dangerous path. He has to change completely before Betty ever enters the picture.
Captain America: Brave New World sends a clear message that it is not the child’s job to make things right with their parents nor to come running when their parent who failed them is in trouble. Additionally, the reunion doesn’t happen the way Ross wants it to. It only happens because he’s left at complete rock bottom and finally takes a slice of humble pie and changes. Once again, the realism shines through because there’s that question of whether he’d have ever changed if he hadn’t reached rock bottom. It reminds us that reunions between estranged family members aren’t that simple. For a lot of us, our estranged parents’ selfishness is so extreme that it would take a life-changing event like being left completely desolate for them to finally have the humility to make some semblance of a relationship feasible.
Even then, the movie reminds us he’ll never get to see the cherry blossoms with his daughter again or have the second chance he imagined. In the end, there were things and chances he lost forever by being a terrible parent. When I left the theater, I didn’t feel pity for him or happy he finally had a conversation with his daughter. I thought he got exactly what he deserved: a second chance solely on his daughter’s terms and when the circumstances ensured she’d be protected if she pursued this reunion.
Captain America: Brave New World didn’t just make me feel seen as an estranged daughter, but it gave me an inkling of hope that maybe it would nag at the consciousness of parents whose children have cut them off. I am realistic enough to know that many parents won’t have the awareness or capacity to see themselves in Ross. For other daughters’ sake, though, I do hope the film makes some parents think long and hard about whether they really want to be Ross and risk estrangement, knowing there’s no guarantee they’ll ever get back what they’ve lost.
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