Bad Mother Movie

I have never been anybody's mother (although there are people who will testify that I did a pretty adequate job as a big sister), so take what I say next with a grain of salt. I appreciate that it might be a good idea to make a movie about the difficulties of parenting in New York, and the pretensions and expectations of mothering in particular. I can see that being a good, sharp, funny movie. But I'm not sure why the makers of Motherhood had to do it by making Uma Thurman look frumpy and frowsy in addition to making her overwhelmed and creatively frustrated:



I have no particular interest in movies about parenting, or about Doing Any Other Theoretically Momentous Thing in New York or Los Angeles at this point, if only because locating movies in those cities tends to either overdetermine the action to the extent that it becomes hugely predictable, or denude the movie of any sense of local detail.  But I am interested in the challenges of mothers with creative and professional ambitions, mostly because I hope to become one.  I think certain things about this trailer are promising, among them Minnie Driver stating quite clearly and frankly that being a working mother takes money in the first place if you expect to hire child care to provide a certain level of attention to your child.  I like that the movie makes clear how hard it can be to write and be creative when you're trying to parent.

But I'm skeezed out by Uma's husband, who seems to be discouraging her from writing. And I'm even more creeped out by the movie's need to draw a physical distinction between Thurman, who is undeniably stunning, and the richer mothers she competes with.  When an impeccably dressed, clearly more affluent woman, asks Thurman if she's wearing her nightgown, it's a weird, ugly moment, one that suggests that despite her good intentions, she really isn't holding it together.  And it seems to imply the exact opposite of what I think the movie's point is, that good parenting is a matter not of aesthetics but of effort.  But then, expecting coherence from this project may be a little much, anyway.