Writer-Director: Katherine Dieckmann
Starring: Uma Thurman, Minnie Driver, Anthony Edwards
Review: 2 stars (of five)
Did you like the way Sex & the City would always be interrupted by Carrie’s stunningly trite observations about single life, and how her role in most episodes was to rant to her friends about the trivial indignities of her mildly privileged lifestyle? Motherhood is like that, only replace references to anal sex with comments on eccentric parenting strategies.
Motherhood purports to explore the nature of that role, particularly the way it demands the mother of young children to put aside what neo-hippies might call “selfhood” to meet the nonstop demands of her parental role. Its method is to set up Uma Thurman as a harried mother of two in Manhattan’s Upper West Side and follow her through one preposterously disaster-filled day, in which she monologues loudly about the indignities of her life, from keeping a parking space in New York to getting ones husband to pay more attention. It’s like a Stations of the Cross for white, nearly-upper-middle-class mommies.
The film’s strength is the ineffable charm of Uma Thurman, whom I feel compelled to like, a lot, despite never having heard her utter a line of dialogue that seemed remotely convincing. This is what makes her shine in the hyperstylized silliness of a Quentin Tarantino film: Thurman is great at getting the emotion across, and making a connection with the viewer. You don’t believe what she says, but you believe what she feels.
Unfortunately, that trait only underscores how contrived this film’s situations and dialogue are. I’ve read that writer-director Katherine Dieckmann is an Upper West Side mommy with exactly the same sort of unlikely apartment arrangement (two in the same building, it’s not worth explaining) that Uma has, and the temptation is to assume this film is Dieckmann’s self-serving take on her personal journey through momminess.
The film certainly feels that way: Uma’s character is entirely self-absorbed (not without reason — parenting is a big, consuming deal), but the film refuses, narratively, to hold her accountable. When characters criticize her, the scenes and the performances are structured to make us, in fact, side with Uma. If, in Badmouth: The Motion Picture, I had a character complain that my reviews are too goddamned long, the Dieckmann method would be to have that character insist a good review must be only seven words long, thus undermining a (truly) valid criticism by delivering it through an absurd straw man. Dieckmann does that a lot.
The film also fails to hold together in a lot of small ways as Dieckmann lumps all her motherhood complaints into one day. For instance, there’s the bit where a younger man all but propositions the lovely Thurman, and in telling her husband later, she complains that he never “looks at [her] like that.” Yet only twenty minutes of screen time earlier, she had in fact rejected her husband (a well-cast Anthony Edwards in a small, grounded role) as he gently proposed a quick (and somewhat ill-timed) romp. That’s a classic mommy complaint — he wants sex, she’s too busy/exhausted. So put it in your day-of-hell movie, but maybe you have to leave out the complaint about he never finds you attractive.
Worse, Thurman has picked this day, it seems (her daughter is turning six and has a big party that Uma must execute) to be utterly overwrought about having temporarily set aside her dreams as a writer. Thus is she struggling to find time to meet the midnight deadline for an online magazine’s mommy column that could net her a steady creative gig. This is her Big Problem in the plot, her need to assert her self-expression through the contest, despite her responsibilities to her family. Will she pull it off? Doesn’t matter! In the end, she receives a magical, much better solution to this problem that has absolutely nothing to do with this contest or any action she’s taken. Thus, the prime struggle through the film, “Can she get this entry written in time?” is void. Oops.
Throughout the day, Thurman, Carrie Bradshaw style, steals moments to type little observations about her life, which she assumes to be universal experience. As with that shallow Sex & the City hellbeast, Thurman’s observations are painfully trite. Later, someone gives Thurman editing feedback that includes the word “banal,” so maybe that’s intentional, but as Thurman’s character finds her voice late in the film, the writing barely improves.
Summary, then: Passable direction, strong cast (Minnie Driver = fun), bad writing full of plot contrivances and unlikely and unwieldy dialogue. However, just as Sex & the City scratches a certain yearning for certain kinds of straight women and gay men, there were more than a few women in my screening audience chuckling at Thurman’s frustrated mini-rants. So for certain people, this movie could be a fun and relatable opportunity to unplug their brains. I am not those people, and the film does not transcend that limited “Oh, that’s me!” demographic.
It’s commendable that someone’s making a movie about the noble institution of motherhood, with an eye to its comical misadventures and deep sacrifices. It’s just too bad it wasn’t made by a more able and creative filmmaker.
