As director Katherine Dieckmann has pointed out, there are precious few comedies that deal with the very real and complicated job of being a woman, wife and mother. She's right, and her film Motherhood sets out to correct that imbalance. Unfortunately, along the way it falls prey to teasing out taboos -- masturbation, infidelity, and accidental pregnancies are among the issues covered -- than actually giving insight into the actions, thoughts and emotions of the modern mother.
The film spans a single day in the life of Eliza Welsh (Uma Thurman), a constantly stressed out mother of two, during a particularly hectic 24 hours. This day holds a few special emergencies, not the least of which is the sixth birthday of her daughter Clara (Daisy Tahan). On top of preparations for the event, super-mommy is also attempting to submit a writing sample to a blog contest and trying not to verbally (or literally) castrate her seemingly indifferent editor husband Avery (Anthony Edwards).
Dieckmann got her start in television, directing episodes of the cult Nickelodeon hit The Adventures of Pete & Pete, and went on to a moderately promising feature debut with 2006's clam-harvesting dramedy Diggers. That film displayed a natural, lived-in sensitivity to common American life, its minor hardships and quiet charms; that it felt like we'd seen the film a thousand times before was somehow comforting rather than frustrating.
Whereas Diggers felt like a complete (if minor) work that played to the director's strengths, Motherhood plays like a bad pilot that has been pumped out to feature length, and it brings Dieckmann's shortcomings into glaring relief. Working from her own screenplay, （英文影评）she offers some humorous one-offs -- the best involves her best friend (Minnie Driver) using her son's plastic submarine as a sex toy -- but very little in the way of emotional honesty, or even genuine comedic bite. The inherently frantic story might have worked as satire or farce, but Dieckmann seems more interested in asking the audience to feel empathy and pity for a fiscally secure white woman with two apartments in Manhattan.
This risible self-seriousness neuters the film's occasionally perceptive humor. What we are left with is 90 unfocused minutes of Uma Thurman complaining about a decent parking space, a misspelled birthday cake, and pretentious neighbors. Of course, Thurman has already played one hell of a parent in the Kill Bill diptych; films that oddly had a lot more to say about motherhood than just about anything else in recent years. Quentin Tarantino's films took their genre foundations and built a powerful story of parental responsibility and devotion out of them. Motherhood, on the other hand, gets stuck in the starting gate, unsure of what kind of film it wants to be.
Sup, tubby?
