Ben Givens and Renee's Father-Daughter Relationship

Ben Givens and Renee's Father-Daughter Relationship is defined in the available scenes by quiet familiarity and Ben’s deep attention to his daughter, but also by a painful asymmetry: he carefully observes and encourages her while hiding his terminal illness and intention not to return. Their dinner the evening before his planned departure makes ordinary family closeness the cover for a deception meant to keep Renee from searching for him.

A Family Dinner Concealing Ben’s Plan

Ben visits Renee the evening before he leaves, sharing dinner with her and his grandson Chris as though everything is ordinary. In fact, he is establishing a plausible account of his absence: he tells them he will cross the mountains to hunt quail in willow canyons, without naming a particular destination, and expects to return Thursday, though he might stay until Friday or Saturday if the hunting is good. The open-ended timetable is designed to postpone alarm; Ben imagines that his family might not miss or seek him until he has been dead for as long as a week.

His concealment is bound up with his concern for what his diagnosis might do to Renee and the family. He imagines his cancer becoming a pestilent force in their lives, or a pall over them just as they have begun to emerge from the pall of Rachel’s death. He decides that the last thing they need is to hear that he has terminal colon cancer. The scene therefore holds affection and withdrawal together: Ben makes the visit and takes care over its ordinary appearance, but withholds the fact that would change its meaning for Renee.

Renee and Her Family

Ben’s attention settles on Renee’s presence as well as her work. At fifty, she is slender and thoroughly gray, and he regards her beauty as durable and quiet, noticing that she is aging in a way he finds poignant and tender. He asks about her work writing screenplays for children’s movies, including two scripts that have earned high respect. Renee is reticent, described as modest by nature, and turns the conversation toward Chris instead.

The dinner brings other family ties into view. Ben asks after his granddaughter Emma, who has married a man from Wellington, New Zealand, and is rarely seen in Seattle, and after Renee’s husband John, away on a business trip. Chris tells Ben that he has begun the clinical portion of his third year of medical school: he is meeting patients to ask questions and practice diagnosis, work he finds more interesting than laboratory study. These details show Ben following the lives around Renee’s table, even as his unspoken plan keeps him from sharing the most consequential fact about his own.

Conversation and an Unfinished Invitation

The relationship is also expressed through the ease of a shared history. Ben abruptly asks Renee whether they might go climbing, noting that they have not gone since August. Renee answers uncertainly, and Ben says he does not know. The exchange leaves the possibility open without confirming that they will climb again. Set against his carefully invented hunting itinerary, the question gives their ordinary conversation a quiet poignancy: Ben reaches toward a familiar activity with his daughter while concealing that his announced trip is not an ordinary outing at all.