It’s rare to see a writer/director’s obscure, intimate cultural obsessions inexplicably come to dominate a film the way they do in the clever Dutch feature Waterboys. In this case, 1980s college radio mainstays The Waterboys, a Scots-Irish folk-rock outfit led by the enigmatic singer Mike Scott, are situated front and center both thematically and musically in this warm-hearted but unflaggingly honest portrayal of the offbeat relationship of a successful aging hack crime novelist (Leopold Witte) and his socially awkward cellist son, Zack (Tim Linde).
We’re given no explicit clues on why the Waterboys’ music means so much to Victor, although we get a (possibly apocryphal) tale that he spins about his son Zack being conceived at an outdoor Waterboys gig in the late 1980s.
As it happens, both Victor and his son, at the beginning of the film, find themselves newly single: Victor comes home to a note from his wife to vacate the premises by the end of the day. This leaves Zack in a pickle as well, as he finds himself mysteriously locked out of the house. What’s more, unluckily Zack’s girlfriend decides to give him his walking papers that day, too. Through such unwelcome happenstance, father and son find an excuse to take a road trip—or in this case, an overnight ferry ride—to Edinburgh, where Victor not only has a book signing to attend but also his precious Waterboys are staging a comeback show.
Along this potentially rocky route to a family reconciliation, director Robert Jan Westdijk takes the time and effort to humanize both father and son on their journey, letting the quirky details of their fraught relationship gradually come to light in a series of patiently shot scenes of filial unease. Victor and Zack, as it turns out, have a competitive wedge between them, more like brothers than father and son, using furtiveness and sometimes callous deception to try to show each other who’s really boss (which also says a lot about their romantic troubles with women).
And of course, the emotional high point of the film is reserved for the Waterboys concert, in which Victor has what amounts to a mind-expanding moral awakening of sorts. Although Jan Westdijk rejects pop sentimentalism in favor of unadulterated human truths, Waterboys still manages to register as an exemplary “feel good” family dramedy of sorts. Recommended.