SERIAL MOM
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1994 Frank Maloney
SERIAL MOM is a film directed and written by John Waters. The cast includes Kathleen Turner, Sam Waterston, Ricki Lake, Traci Lords, Suzanne Somers, Patricia Hearst, and Mink Stole. Rated R for violence. (Also rough language.)
SERIAL MOM is both a return and a departure for John Waters, the insightful auteur of bad taste, whose string of midnight classics began with MULTIPLE MANIACS, reached a climax of a sort in PINK FLAMINGOES, and continued with FEMALE TROUBLES and DESPERATE LIVING. Starting with the 1981 film POLYESTER, famous for its scratch 'n' sniff Odorama cards if nothing else, Waters moved out of the midnight ghetto; he has since followed with the musicals HAIRSPRAY and CRY-BABY. These latter-day Waters films have their charms, but they lack the over-the-top grossness and vision of the midnight days. So to that extent SERIAL MOM represents something of a return to offensiveness and truth-telling. On the other hand, Waters has never had the services of such a well-known actress as he had in the person of Kathleen Turner.
Turner has found her metier in SERIAL MOM. I have the feeling that lately she has been struggling to find a niche for herself as a middle-aged woman in an industry that often thinks women are over the hill and unemployable after 30. Turner tried the hard-boiled detective in V. I. WARSHAWSKY and the spy with a child care problem in UNDERCOVER BLUES, but basically she hasn't had a hit since 1989's WAR OF THE ROSES. Of course, we always knew she was a talented comedienne; ROMANCING THE STONE established that. And as the title character in SERIAL MOM she is perfect, unfailingly funny, and as deadly a wielder of black comedy as she is of pokers and legs of lamb. She is the last word in the out of control, self-controlled control freak who insists that everyone play by her rules. She never loses her cool or her confidence. She knows with an unshakeable surety that one does not wear white shoes after Labor Day and that the seat belt law must be obeyed. She lives in the perfect world of the upper middle class suburb; she oversees the perfect family. Nothing must be tolerated to threaten that perfection. She makes no effort to cover her crimes and she gets away with them. After all, she is right. Anyone who refuses to rewind her rental tapes deserves to die; anyone ought to be able to see that. Turner never breaks character, never once retreats from the smug savagery and the complacent campiness of her role. In the hands of a lesser actor, the part could have been career suicide. For Kathleen Turner, it is likely to be a career revivifier.
As for Waters, nobody does it better, and it is a genuine pleasure to have him back behind the camera producing a mainstream version of his 70s masterpieces. Waters is a film maker of extraordinary vision and clarity. He *sees* America in a way very few do; he makes us laugh at its viciousness, it violence, its hypocrisy; what else can we do? And he translates his black vision into films no one else could make, despite his many imitators who content to go for the gag but not the content.
And he continues to give us the pleasure of his company of unique actors. We cannot have Divine any longer, but there are still Ricki Lake, Traci Lords, Mink Stole, and a further collection of wonderful faces and bodies that have nothing to do with Hollywood. In this regard (and others), Waters is America's equivalent of that other great, gay film maker and visionary Pedro Almodovar, and for me that is high praise indeed.
I recommend SERIAL MOM most highly. Pay what you must; it will be worth it.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney
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