Occasionally, as when David realizes that one of his daughters has a heroin problem, he feels moved to step forward and help without revealing his identity; in other cases, he simply feels a certain joy in getting to know these strangers who are just a little like him. (Though very few of them actually resemble him.)
David's initial dismay at having launched so many lives turns into elation, temporarily distracting him from his debt problems and gradually preparing him for a more involved kind of fatherhood. Huard doesn't overplay the big transformation, and his performance may be the key to the movie's effectiveness. (The picture is being remade in Hollywood under the title The Delivery Man, starring Vince Vaughn.)
David is a guy hoping to sprint through middle age: He still plays football — the European kind — regularly, but you can sense the soft thickening of his middle beneath that track suit. He shaves only intermittently, and the thick patches of gray in his beard make him look both slightly distinguished and a little tired.
But Huard's David is also a man who's still capable of surprise, and of change — even his rather dull job, as a delivery man for his family's butcher business, ends up providing a solution to one of his chief problems.
There are certain plot points in Starbuck, it's true, that either don't make much sense or are simply underexplained. But the picture is so breezily warm, without being too insistently ingratiating, that those flaws don't matter much.
How many kids are too many? The Monty Python guys once sang, ironically, that every sperm is sacred. In Starbuck, charmingly enough, it's actually sort of true.