“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.
