The Return

I thought this movie had a very good bookend. We start off with visuals of a sunken boat with a motor, and in the end we find out why. Ivan is scared of heights in the beginning, and that remains at the end when his father tries to climb up after him. There was not a lot of ambiguity in the film except for the fathers history and his motives. The story laid itself out very nicely.
The return of the boy's father was certainly not expected by the family. I'm not too sure that the mother was thrilled to see him. When they went to bed that night, she seemed terrified and sad when she rolled over in bed. The whole dinner situation made it seem like the breakup hadn't exactly been clean. I got the sense that the father just up and left.
The father did not seem like an easy person to get along with. He's very mysterious for starters. Second, he demads respect from the family like he's been there the whole time. Ivan definately feels betrayed by the father. For being the "coward" for not jumping early in the film, he definately does not shy away from his father. What's a young boy supposed to think when someone that he does not recognice comes to claim him as a son?
Because Andrey is older than Ivan, I think that Andrey developed more of a relationship than Ivan. I would have thought it the other way around, but that's how the story unfolded. What's interesting is that the father seems to strengthen the boys relationship with each other. At the begining of the film Ivan was picked on and called squirt. By the end of the movie Andrey still called Ivan squirt but he did so with more feeling.
I get the sense that some people would blame Ivan for the events of the movie, but I don't. What kind of dad shows up after 12 years and acts like nothing happened. Not to mention, he took the boys to the middle of nowhere in a patched up boat with nowhere for them to go. For a while I thought that the father was going to kill the kids. I can't say I'm surprised that the father did actually die. I felt bad when he died though because when he finally got the top of the tower the expression on his face asked forgiveness. Who's to say who deserved what? I think the ending was fine except that we never learned of the father's true intentions for anything.