Thriller Self/less rues lost fatherhood

Hollywood occasionally admits money can’t buy happiness but rarely owns up to its role in disconnecting men from their families. Self/less, a better-than-average medical sci-fi thriller, shines a spotlight on greed’s consequences and expresses remorse for a generation’s lost fatherhood.

Billionaire real estate tycoon Damian Hale (Ben Kingsley) built much of New York City but rarely spent time with his daughter, Claire (Michelle Dockery). Now cancer rifles his lungs and liver, and doctors have given him only months to live.

“An old man dying, I’m supposed to say ‘that’s life,’” Damian laments to his business partner, Martin (Victor Garber), as they dine in a posh lounge overlooking the Gotham skyline. But Martin offers him a reprieve—Phoenix Biogenic, a company that can transfer the mind and personality from one person to another through a radical procedure called “shedding.”

After staging a fake, public death, Damian sheds his old man at Phoenix’s laboratory, becoming a newer creation. He believes he inhabits a cryogenically enhanced, 35-year-old body. When unfamiliar memories begin to plague him, Phoenix executive Dr. Albright (Matthew Goode) assures him they’re merely hallucinations. Against Albright’s orders, he investigates, discovering his body formerly belonged to Mark (Ryan Reynolds), whose wife (Natalie Martinez) and a six-year-old daughter thought he was dead. After he finds them, Phoenix Biogenic attempts to kill Damian and Mark’s family to cover up the company’s controversial practices.

While trying to stay alive, Damian deliberates how he should live out his second life. He can continue taking pills that preserve his Damian consciousness or discontinue them and become fully Mark. Should he walk out on a little girl so he can again savor the pleasures of health and wealth? Or should he completely lay aside his past self to build a happy and secure future for Mark’s wife and child?

Although Self/less occasionally resorts to car chases and gun battles to hold viewers’ attention, the film succeeds with a well-designed scheme of set-ups and follow-throughs. Understandably, though, many viewers may experience nothing more than a fountain-of-youth fantasy.

But Self/less (rated PG-13 for sequences of violence, some sexuality, and language) resounds with Baby Boomers’ anguish over having sacrificed fatherhood on the altars of sex and money. The destroyed lives of children (preborn and adult) lie strewn at their fathers’ feet. Through this film, perhaps dads of this generation will learn the lessons mortality taught one remorseful father who went before them.