Filmed in 1980 - Jake (David Soul) wants to pick up his son for their summer vacation. Jake and the boy's mother are divorced, and each year Jake has him for the month of August. But this is likely to be Bobby's last August, for he has an incurable illness. Jake simply cannot confront that fact. He can say the words, but he can't let the reality come through, and he can't express his love to his son. It's as if he's afraid that once the long repressed emotions are let out, he and Bobby will both drown in them. So he plans another itinerary of fun, trying to fill the August to the brim with good times. Before, they have had to crowd a year into each August... now they have to carm in a lifetime. Jake wants them to take every amusement park in California, then go surfing at Maui. During the day he keeps up light-hearted banter with Bobby, and at night he wakes up in nightmares. Bobby is in his mid-teens, with a maturity and sensitivity far beyond his age, perhaps because of everything he has already been through. He realises that what Jake is doing is important to him, but finally he takes the opportunity to suggest they do something else. What he really wants to do is go to the old family vineyard in northern California and get to know the grandfather he has met only once, years before. He wants to see the land that has been in the family for generations and feel the permanence of a way of life that goes on unchanged for lifetime after lifetime. It's the last place Jake wants to go. He and his father never understood each other, were never able to find any common ground on which to respect each other. Long ago Jake fled to find his own life elsewhere, and went back only once, for his mother's funeral. But to please Bobby, he eventually gives in, agreeing not to give away Bobby's secret, the grim prognosis of his disease, so that Bobby will be treated normally. When they arrive at the vineyard, things are no better than Jake expected. Jake's father, Harry Seaton, takes to Bobby at once, but between Jake and Harry the old animosities flare up, unforgiven after twenty years. Harry feels that Jake is a quitter, a runner-away who broke his mother's heart. As he points out many times during their disagreements, Jake still walks away to avoid confrontations or a show of feelings. Harry thought it was bad enough that Jake had wanted to be a novelist, dealing in ideas instead of the reality of growing things, but instead even worse, he became an advertising executive, a manipulator, to Harry's mind, dealing in deception and pretence for a living. Jake finds himself rebelling all over again against his father's ironclad attitudes, his provincialism and need to have the last word in every situation. Their shared love for Bobby brings Jake and Harry together, and the nicest thing of all is that it is Bobby's life which revives the long-buried love between Jake and Harry, not his death. |