Most Americans are not millionaires but wish they could be, but most millionaires are too busy to enjoy a comfortable family life after work and rarely contemplate what they are missing, or so we are led to believe in The Family Man, directed by Brett Ratner. Chronologically, the story begins in 1987, when Jack Campbell (played by Nicholas Cage) is at the airport, about to board a flight from New York to London to become a trainee at Barclay’s Bank. His sweetheart Kate (played by Téa Leoni), who is about to enroll in law school, suddenly sobs that his departure will mean the end of their relationship and begs him not to go. Jack, however, departs. After his year in London, he returns to New York and eventually becomes a billionaire CEO of an investment firm. On Christmas eve 2000, when the film actually begins, he receives a telephone call from Kate but is too busy with his $130 billion merger deal and nightly visit from a high-class prostitute to return the call. Walking home from work one night, he goes into a convenience store to purchase eggnog. Cash, an African American (played by Don Cheadle), pulls a gun when the Asian American store proprietor refuses to process his lottery ticket. Jack, however, offers to pay him $200 for the ticket, and Cash rewards him by offering him a “glimpse” of what his life might have been had he not gone to London, though Campbell declares, “I have everything I’ve ever wanted.” After sleeping in his Manhattan apartment that night, he wakes up in bed with Kate in their suburban home in Teaneck, New Jersey, where he has two adorable children and is assistant manager of a tire company. During the next part of the film he tries to discover who he is in the context of a well-programmed family life, working for his wife’s father (played by Harve Presnell), and he has to cope with unfamiliar friends at various social occasions. In an effort to merge family with corporate success, he impresses the executives at his old firm, who hire him and give him the keys to a plush Manhattan apartment, but suburban Kate objects, so he declines the offer. He gradually realizes that his family routine involving people being themselves is more rewarding than his corporate routine of sycophantic employees and alluring prostitutes, all trying to make a buck. Ultimately, Cash lowers the curtain on his “glimpse,” and he is back to normal as a corporate CEO. He then decides to return that telephone call from Kate. A successful unmarried Manhattan pro bono attorney who is moving to head her law firm’s Paris office, she has summoned him to return a box of mementos from their earlier life together, but as he takes the box and leaves, he realizes that he has been given the brush-off by someone dear to his heart. Filled with nostalgia that he might miss another opportunity to be with the love of his life, he drives to Kennedy Airport to stop her from going to Paris. His plea to start a life together with a family and a suburban home in their future leaves Kate at first speechless. That she might or might not consent and abandon her plans for a life in Paris to live with the love of her life provides the only real suspense in the film, but her answer is not surprising. The Family Man is perhaps a riposte to American Beauty (1999) about the advantages of the simple family life, while readers of Eugen Onegin may enjoy the Americanization of the Pushkin story, and filmviewers will find that The Family Man is a variation on the theme of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) or Sliding Doors (1998), with a tagline “What if . . . ” As a feel-good movie, The Family Man is therapy for the many who never achieved ambitions of attaining great wealth and position but settled instead to live the happy conventional American dream. Middle class filmviewers, in short, can rest content that they enjoy better lives than the rich without any need to question corporate greed, racism, extreme income inequality, or why the now-reconciled couple in The Family Man may not live happily ever after. MH