I haven’t seen the film Motherhood so I can’t say whether I find it good, bad or indifferent in its take on ‘mummy bloggers’ (though the trailer certainly looks painful and of course it has utterly bombed in the UK), but I find the film reviews interesting. There is a whole lot of hating going on in them and I get the distinct impression that the hatred is not entirely reserved for fictional mothers played by Uma Thurman.
Thurman plays Eliza Welch, the harried sort of woman who doesn’t realize that her stroller just ran you off the sidewalk. You’ve stood behind her at the coffee shop as the cellphone conversation she’s having blasts the entire store. She’s told you off for calling her “ma’am’’ or looked down her nose at you for, say, “just’’ being a roofer. I wish I were kidding when I tell you that Eliza has a blog called the Bjorn Identity (so named for the best-selling yuppie baby sling) and that she pollutes it with thoughts like, “Must a woman’s soul die because she’s a mommy?’’ But I’m not. (From here).
As a sleepless, serially blogging, financially strapped, generally embittered Manhattan mom of two, Uma Thurman looks convincingly frumpy. But a would-be comedic script by director Katherine Dieckmann (“Diggers”) forces the star to spout such geysers of self-pity, you’d think motherhood in the West Village was akin to, say, motherhood in Eastern Congo. (From here).
Thurman’s Eliza used to write “fiercely lyrical fiction”, we’re told, but now settles for the world’s most excruciating blog, while she hurries around the West Village shopping for a birthday party and squabbling with total strangers. That’s pretty much it, unless you count a subplot involving Minnie Driver and a phallic bath toy. That is, literally, it. Is it meant to be funny? (From here).
Her eye for the details of motherhood, from the list-making to the depressing nature of adults socializing in a sandbox while their precious offspring play, is so acute. If she would just edit out the few soft touches designed to make us like Eliza — like her kind attentions to an elderly neighbor — Motherhood would play like a flat-out parody of the entitled, self-involved mother, fretting more than she copes and blogging more than she mothers. Isn’t that a character ripe for mocking? (From here).
Well, I feel maligned.
Yeah, who do they think is their audience for their reviews of a movie called Motherhood? Maybe mothers?
This passage
sounds like they’ve caught an audience full of hostility toward mothers and just looking for an excuse to let it out. (‘If she would just stop humanizing the main character, we’d be free to hate her properly.’) Maybe someone proposed a pro-mother story and then movie executives imposed an anti-mother frame to suit their tastes? That would account for the conflict between ‘apparently aimed at mothers’ and ‘hostile toward mothers’. But according to that review, the same person wrote and directed the movie; I would think that gave her the power to shape it as she wished.
(Not by you I hasten to point out.)
Depressing that the Mum has to be played by the wafer-thin and gorgeous Uma Thurmann. Frumpy? I don’t bloody well think so, it’s the classic “put a pair of heavy framed glasses on a drop dead gorgeous star and pretend she’s therefore ‘frumpy'” sell Hollywood has been submitting us to since early last century.
Well, that review was from Variety, which is focused on the entertainment industry. I think it distorts their vision, so anything other than ‘perfectly groomed, in the very latest showoffy fashion’ seems frumpy to them.
Hi,
I just wanted to pass on that I heard a news report on the radio that a UK site called mumsnet is being recognised as important to the outcome of the next election.
see: http://www.mumsnet.com/politics/general-election-2010
I posted an item about this on a very active Australian forum site called mumzies. Have a look and in the meantime you could post a link to your blog.
with our election coming up this year, would be great to get something local going on the net – for both discussion and networking.
see: http://mumziesforum.net/forum.php
whatdoyareckon? Joannie
I just saw it.
It was terrible.
There was just something so off about it.
I like moms. I like mommy bloggers.
I did not like that movie.
The main character really was just going off at strangers all the time. Her angst was confusing. It involved a lot of bitterness about parking bylaws in NYC that I didn’t understand.
And the kids in the movie were very much props, not humans that the main character related to on any level.
I hate it when movies and tv shows portray mothers as people who carry children around like handbags instead of people who are in complex relationships with small people.
Don’t take it personally.
It’s just a stinker.
Yes, mother-hate is rampant out there, but the comments on this movie are unfortunately spot-on. It was beyond atrocious.
There’s a lot to be said about motherhood, but this movie says none of it. The woman’s main “problem” is whether to succumb to loot-bag tyranny (ie. buy loot bags) for her daughter’s birthday. The toddler son never cries (or even talks, for that matter). They’re “poor” but they also happen to live in two (yes, two) rent-controlled apartments that are side-by-side. She stays home with the kids, and the hubby has a job that allows him to get home at 1:30 in the afternoon so he can watch the toddler while she rushes off to prepare the perfect birthday party for their daughter. So as far as I could tell, they’re financially strapped by choice and it was hard to feel any sort of empathy for her problems.
There were two good lines in the whole thing:
1. Hubby asks her why she’s out shopping with friends instead of writing an essay that’s supposedly the most important thing in the world and the one thing that will let her get her soul and self back. But instead she goes shopping and whines about having no time to write and think.
2. She does talk about how all the stupid minutiae of parenting adds up into a mass that just sucks up your time and energy and brain. It was the only line worth seeing in the entire movie.
I really wanted to like it- I was actually quite excited that they’d made a movie about a modern mother living in NY- but it was just too obnoxious and unbelievable. The comment about it not being a parody b/c they softened her edges was unfortunately very accurate.
OK the movie sucks, but is the criticism in the reviews all about the movie?