A story about a husband dealing with the loss of his wife while also learning how to truly be a father to his children for the first time, The Boys Are Back is kind of like To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday, Big Daddy, and Stepmom if you toned down the comedy, substituted memorably authentic moments for overdramatic soap opera, wiped off the Hollywood gloss, set it in Australia, and cast Clive Owen in the lead role. The meeting of a film about death and loss and a film about a man who discovers a new sense of self in parenthood, Boys offers itself as a story for those grieving a lost love and relationship, those trying to figure out their identity as a parent, and those who are searching for their value as a member of family in general. And while the story offers few momentous events or surprises and does not have even one shot of Owen running through city streets with guns blazing, in its quiet and simple journey from confusion and despair to unity and hope is a sincere story of emotional truth.

With the death of Katie Warr (Laura Fraser) serving as the event that puts the entire story into motion, much of Boys deals with the reality of grief and loss. In Owen's Joe Warr, we see its manifestation in a tearful breakdown in the middle of a field next to his house, the bottles and glasses and tumblers almost always in his hand, and an impromptu road trip to anywhere but the home he shared with Katie. In Warr's six-year-old son Artie, grief comes to life in a reckless desire to take fun to the max, completely unresponsive, near-comatose states, and rebellion against the man who sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully, tries to fill the hole his mother left behind. For Warr the process is slightly more restrained and almost unaware of its reason, but for Artie his grief is completely unfiltered and unapologetic. And through a child who is not afraid of acting out exactly how he feels, we witness grief's desire to forget and escape, its near-drowning sense of overwhelmedness, and its inability to comprehend anything that can fill the hole that has been left.

Giving off neither an overdramatized nor underplayed sense of emotion, the grieving process that Boys brings to life hits the screen with a sense of reality. Although I cannot say from personal experience, I suspect many who have experienced a similar loss could probably identify with one or more of Warr or Artie's expressions of grief. However, I would go one step further to say that Warr and Artie's reactions and ways of dealing with a separation from one they love is a reality that all of us know intimately. That separation being between us and God our Father.

I'm not saying that God died and left us to fend for ourselves. He didn't go off and create another universe to love and leave us all alone wondering why we just weren't good enough. But as Adam and Eve quickly found out as soon as sin entered the picture, so also entered a separation between our world and God's world. As even Jesus, God's only son, demonstrated when he cried out the words, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" when sin comes between us and God, the feeling is nothing short of betrayal and death. And as Artie reveals time and time again, the disruption of that sort of intimate connection with someone whom we have loved and looked to for love leaves us desiring nothing more than to bridge that gap and rejoin our worlds. "I want to die so I can be with mommy," Artie tells his father soon after his mother dies. "I want to die so I can be with God," I have thought far more times than I will ever admit. "The trouble is it's not me he wants. It's you," Warr tells Katie when she appears to him one of several times after she has died. "The trouble is, nothing here ever makes me feel happy, full, loved, valuable..." I tell myself far too often. "Maybe it's because what I need is not here," a voice in my head says back.

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