MOTHER
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1996 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: A doubly-divorced man decides to
return to living in his mother's house in an
experiment to understand his relationships with the
women in his life. MOTHER may well be the least of
Albert Brooks's generally reliable comedies. This
one has a serious message in the end which comes
off as a little contrived and superficial.
Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4)
There is a very selective appeal to Albert Brooks comedies. They are low-budget, intelligently written pieces in which the humor mostly comes from dialogue. Like Woody Allen, Brooks usually plays an intelligent neurotic and the comedy ordinarily comes from the dialogue as it does in a Woody Allen comedy. Where Brooks differs is that his characters speak in a much more natural manner than Allen's and his humor is more subtle. Also his comedies often take a little longer to settle in. It is hard to judge on a first viewing how funny an Albert Brooks comedy will be the second time around. Usually like a Thanksgiving turkey they are a feast the first time around but are not at their best until the second or third partaking. Then some of his gags take on classic proportions. Bits like forbidding Julie Hagerty to use the words "nest" or "egg" are hilarious and at the same time ring very true.
That said, MOTHER is just a bit substandard for a Brooks-directed comedy. Brooks usually uses as a format the experiment that fails--the good idea gone awry. Of five Brooks comedies, only DEFENDING YOUR LIFE does not fall into this "it seemed like a good idea at the time" pattern. In MODERN ROMANCE the Brooks character decides to break up with a woman and then finds the single life is not all he was expecting. LOST IN AMERICA involved a wealthy advertising executive who drops out, buys a Winnebago, and tries to live on the road. This time around, in what could have almost been a sequel to MODERN ROMANCE, John Henderson (Brooks) is a man who cannot deal with the women in his life. To understand why he returns to the home of his mother (Debbie Reynolds) to live in his old bedroom, decorated just like the old days, in an attempt to discover what he will learn. What he finds is that his mother is hard to live with. Eventually he discovers why his relationship with his mother has been strained. But while the reason satisfies him, it turns out to be a not very satisfying or even interesting contrivance. Most people I know have problems to some degree in dealing with their parents not unlike those in this film, but Brooks's rather pat explanation for his case just does not explain very much of the problem. If the mother-son problems are dispelled a little too easily, at least the script does not place all the blame on the mother. Beatrice Henderson comes off as an intelligent and self- reliant woman who can run her own life just fine, thank you, and who once raised two bright kids, John and his brother (Rob Morrow of QUIZ SHOW).
While I have come to expect a fair amount of a Brooks comedy, somehow here his timing seemed just a bit off. A scene early in the film has John rearranging the one chair that his divorce has left him in a large empty living room. He tries the chair in four places before deciding that it worked best where it was. The joke takes too much screen time for way too little payoff. This is not the sort of perceptive humor we expect from Brooks. Later, when he is in his mother's home, the film tries to milk as much humor as possible from his mother freezing a big chunk of cheese and a salad. These gags are more miss than hit in this film's hit-and-miss humor. On the other hand, there is some perceptive humor in Beatrice's repeated references to writer John's lack of Stephen-King-like success in his writing profession and the greater success of her other son, the sports agent. There are a number of very clever gags including a very impressively managed allusion to the film THE GRADUATE--telling any more would spoil it. Like Woody Allen, Brooks seems to play the same character from film to film. Reynolds is, of course, a veteran actress. She holds her own against Brooks. One minor gripe: in MODERN ROMANCE the character was editing a science fiction film, in this film John is a science fiction writer, but in each film he seems to be very condescending toward science fiction. In his most recent novel they talk about the character "with the big head" and the one "with the big hand." It is hard to imagine he could make a living writing science fiction if he is writing at the level suggested in the film.
Since Brooks directs a comedy only once in about five years, it is a pity that this film is so frequently not up to his usual standard. His comedy about a mother and son learning about each other could have been a lot more memorable than this one was, but there are still more laugh-out-loud gags than most comedies, and there is a bit of a statement here also, so I give MOTHER a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
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