‘The Breadwinner’ Review: Nate Bargatze Bumbles Through a Domestic Comedy That Thinks Incompetent Dads are Still Funny

May 27, 2026 9:00am PT ‘The Breadwinner’ Review: Nate Bargatze Bumbles Through a Domestic Comedy That Thinks Incompetent Dads are Still Funny

The comedian’s 'Mr. Mom' update offers a few opportunities to chuckle, but the gags mostly fall flat.

By Natalia Winkelman

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Natalia Winkelman

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“When mom goes to work, dad goes berserk!” read the tagline for Stan Dragoti’s 1983 comedy “Mr. Mom.” The line could just as easily be plastered across the poster of “The Breadwinner,” an unimaginative update of the househusband formula directed by Eric Appel and starring the comedian Nate Bargatze, also its co-writer. The broadest of comedies, the film’s often puerile humor is driven by an endless stream of male bungling, blundering and whining, only to be kicked up a notch by pratfalls of nearly every variety, from getting bucked off a galloping horse to tripping into a pile of trash.

That latter slip occurs even before the opening credits are done rolling, during which our hero, Nate Wilcox (Bargatze), lays out the status quo in a voiceover. Nate is “the best car salesman this side of the Mississippi,” he brags, before caveating that, because he’s the family’s sole breadwinner, he leaves all of the household duties to his stay-at-home wife, Katie (a game Mandy Moore). This means that while Nate sells Toyotas, Katie stewards their suburban Nashville home and oversees the schedules of their three chipper daughters: the teenage Gracie (Stella Grace Fitzgerald), fond of skin products and cute boys; the tween Hadley (Birdie Borria), a spelling obsessive; and Sam (Charlotte Ann Tucker), the pigtailed youngster.

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Happily married and comfortably middle class, the couple relishes their gendered roles, until Katie devises an original children’s accessory that lands her on “Shark Tank.” There, Lori Greiner (playing herself) agrees to invest in Katie’s design on one condition: Nate take time off work to run the household while Katie kick-starts her business. Soon, Katie is off to South Korea to supervise manufacturing, while Nate, amenable if unenthusiastic, braces to tackle his new jobs: cooking, laundry and childrearing. How hard can a little domestic labor be?

For Nate, who seems to have never set foot in his own kitchen, the answer is very. Surprise, surprise, homemaking takes effort, too, and as Nate struggles, “The Breadwinner” tries to spin comedy out of his blunders. Which means the top of the film’s second act goes a little like this: Nate trips on the stairs while doing laundry! Nate burns the toast during breakfast! Nate crashes the car while distracted during school drop-off!

All this floundering might sound as stale as three-day old takeout pizza, and it plays that way, too. (The trailer for “Mr. Mom” actually includes a better burnt-toast gag than the one in “The Breadwinner,” which is pretty embarrassing for a movie that name-checks the carb in the title.) But Bargatze, to his credit, also finds ways to spice up the comic monotony. You might even laugh aloud when the pizza delivery boy (Martin Herlihy) earnestly responds, “This is the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me,” after Nate, saying he’ll be seeing a lot of him, tips the guy a $20.

On one occasion, the film delightfully spills over into the surreal: a cartoonish montage that finds Nate using a drill to scour hardened oatmeal from the bottom of a kitchen pot. The montage pairs this image with uncanny shots of our rookie homemaker literally drowning in a mountain of laundry. As the dirty clothes and towels swallow him like quicksand, you might briefly hallucinate that you’re watching “I Love Boosters,” the far cleverer new comedy from Boots Riley.

An array of familiar comedy faces clog up the film’s periphery, including Colin Jost as Conor, the town’s seemingly only other stay-at-home dad, and Kumail Nanjiani as Peyton, a competing Toyota salesman. Both function essentially as extratextual fluff: Jost leans on his punchable persona as Conor begs Nate to hang out with him, while Nanjiani’s running joke hangs on Peyton’s muscle-bound physique, which he flaunts to lure in potential customers.

Their thinly sketched roles only underscore the welcome presence of Nate’s three daughters, who — while individualized with distinct wants and needs — maintain a feminine alliance that gives the story its heart. Gracie, the eldest, also gets one of the best lines; watching her mother drive away, she sighs, “Guess we’re on our own now: three orphans.”

The big problem with “The Breadwinner” isn’t its sense of humor — as sarcasm is stacked atop slapstick, viewers will find excuses to chuckle — but its confused message. The film begins with a division of labor that, however much it resembles a midcentury sitcom, appears to work well for both Nate and Katie. So why, during Nate’s inevitable third-act “moral of the story” speech, does he insist that his month at home has been the best of his life? Did the horse bucking give him brain damage? Hasn’t he ruined all of their lives?

“The Breadwinner” would like to spin Nate’s mess into a lesson about the value of domestic work, but the tacked-on ending can’t overcome the regressive premise underneath. And let alone regressive — how about boring? Here is the story of a moron with such limited interest in subordinating his own needs that he destroys everything around him. Select moments may land a laugh, but zoom out a little, and the real joke is that this movie was made in 2026.

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