‘Tombi: Father and Son’: Showa nostalgia misses the mark

We can’t choose our parents. When his mother dies in a freak accident, 3-year-old Akira is left in the custody of his father, Yasu (Hiroshi Abe), a manual laborer working in a seaside town in western Japan.

Quick to anger and overly fond of his drink, Yasu isn’t exactly ideal dad material: When his wife gives birth, he’s in the middle of a brawl in the hospital corridor. However, having been raised an orphan himself, he’s determined to give Akira a better upbringing. And when he gets things wrong — which is often — the local community steps in to help, including close friend Soun (Ken Yasuda) and restaurant owner Taeko (Hiroko Yakushimaru).

Yasu’s ham-fisted efforts to be a good pop provide the main thrust for the decades-spanning drama of Takahisa Zeze’s “Tombi: Father and Son,” based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Kiyoshi Shigematsu. Starting in 1963, the story extends to the end of the Showa Era (1926-89), then tacks on an epilogue that brings things up to the present day.

This is a period that inspires paroxysms of nostalgia in Japanese filmmakers, and Zeze is no exception. While “Tombi” isn’t quite as misty-eyed as Takashi Yamazaki’s “Always: Sunset on Third Street” series (2005-12), still the zenith of Showa sentimentality, it’s a close call.

If the story feels familiar, that’s because it has already been adapted twice for TV, which is perhaps a better format for such a sweeping narrative. Zeze’s version, working from a screenplay by Takehiko Minato, feels like an NHK morning drama serial squeezed into a feature-length running time.

Minato’s script employs a tricksy structure, flipping between a chronological account of Akira’s childhood and a single day in 1988, when Yasu heads to Tokyo for a reunion with his now-estranged son (played as an adult by Takumi Kitamura). But the latter timeline takes forever to come into focus, with the result that you end up feeling every one of the movie’s 139 minutes.

Zeze, usually a dependable pair of hands, succumbs to his worst tendencies here. The cast — few of whom sound convincing speaking in the story’s Hiroshima dialect — give embarrassingly broad performances. In the early scenes, when they’re playing characters a few decades younger than their actual ages, the effect is unintentionally camp.

At 57, Abe has the kind of physique that most men his age would sell their children for, but he looks ridiculous pretending to be a virile young buck in his 20s. He’s clearly aiming for the swaggering physicality that Toshiro Mifune brought to Hiroshi Inagaki’s “Rickshaw Man” (1958), the film’s most obvious reference point, but never seems to get past the mannerisms. The pathos of Inagaki’s movie is sorely lacking, too.

There’s the odd scene that stands out, like a tete-a-tete in a public bathhouse, with both father and son in their birthday suits, or when Yasu makes amends for giving the teenage Akira a black eye by beating himself up (recalling Edward Norton’s one-man knock-down in “Fight Club”).

However, the film has the same problem as its careening protagonist: It never pauses to savor the moment. Overlong, overripe yet curiously underwhelming, this is a misfire from one of Japan’s most reliable purveyors of middlebrow literary adaptations.