MOTHER
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(Paramount) Starring: Albert Brooks, Debbie Reynolds, Rob Morrow, Lisa Kudrow. Screenplay: Albert Brooks and Monica Johnson. Producers: Scott Rudin and Herb Nanas. Director: Albert Brooks. MPAA Rating: PG (profanity, adult themes) Running Time: 104 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Albert Brooks is a rather odd case as a film-maker. On the one hand, he goes years between projects, has loyal and generally intelligent fans and never has had a really big commercial success. On the other hand, his concepts have "pitch-meeting" written all over them. REAL LIFE was a parody of verite' documentaries like "An American Family;" LOST IN AMERICA had yuppies going back to their free-wheeling roots; DEFENDING YOUR LIFE turned heaven into "The People's Court." Brooks is like a hybrid of Woody Allen and Ivan Reitman, a writer/director too smart and eccentric to get maximum mileage out of his marketing-friendly plots. MOTHER is a perfect example of Brooks' nose for high-concept, but for once he doesn't work any particular magic with it. Riding on the familiarity of his situations and a wicked performance by Debbie Reynolds, Brooks turns out an amusing but uneven domestic comedy.
Brooks stars as John Henderson, a Los Angeles-based science-fiction novelist going through his second divorce. John determines that all of his failed relationships have had certain elements in common, and that those elements might be traceable to his upbringing. In an attempt to understand what goes wrong in his dealings with women, John heads up to Northern California to move back in with the first woman in his life: his mother, Beatrice (Debbie Reynolds). John's "experiment" perplexes both Beatrice and John's successful brother Jeff (Rob Morrow), but John perseveres anyway, and begins to examine his interactions with Beatrice in the hope of learning some profound truths before she drives him crazy.
Much of the appeal of MOTHER -- most of the appeal, to be frank -- comes from the character of Beatrice Henderson, less as created by Brooks than as realized by Reynolds. Mother is a sly creature given to subtle disapproval and passive aggression, and there are moments of grand humiliation which will inspire winces of recognition. One running gag has Mother constantly explaining John's marital woes to complete strangers; another finds her making off-hand digs at John's vegetarianism. There are moments when Brooks verges on condescension towards his older female characters -- an encounter with neighbors in a grocery store is both funny and rather embarrassing -- but Debbie Reynolds salvages every one by giving her line readings an intelligent twist. Even when Beatrice is fumbling with technology or circling a parking lot past the one available space, she never comes off as dim or pathetic. With a professionalism showing no signs of rust after a long layoff from screen acting, Reynolds wrestles a laundry list of motherly quirks into a wonderful character.
This achievement comes almost in spite of Brooks' script, which has plenty of funny lines but too little narrative direction. The goodwill generated by the main premise carries MOTHER a surprisingly long way, but Brooks doesn't do all that much with it. The film is full of situations with great comic potential, most of which inspire a chuckle and little more because Brooks prefers wry observation to outrageousness. One such opportunity involves John and Beatrice in a Victoria's Secret store after Beatrice has succeeded yet again in embarrassing John. It is a scene which primes you for a huge laugh -- a man, his mother, lingerie...can you feel the giddy tension rising? -- then dissolves after yet another good-natured chuckle. MOTHER is full of moments, like a scene where John channel-surfs through a succession of info-mercials, where Brooks seems to be waiting for a punch line to formulate itself instead of attacking the set-up to provide a payoff.
MOTHER is almost always an entertaining film, but it is not nearly as subversive as it could have been, or as FLIRTING WITH DISASTER was covering similar ground of warped familial relations. Perhaps the problem is that the script does not launch itself from full, rich characterizations. In fact, as the story unfolds, it seems that Brooks has constructed his story around psychological case studies rather than people. Every time Mother does something exasperating, John deconstructs it in search of its deeper significance. The result is frustrating, as though Brooks were telling jokes then stopping after each one to explain why it was just as sad as it was funny. It is one of the characteristics which makes Brooks unique as a film-maker that he builds his climax around a moment of insight rather than a wacky car chase, but there has to be a middle ground. Debbie Reynolds takes MOTHER's high-concept and gives it high energy, making it a film anyone who has had a mother could like, but perhaps only a mother could love.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 mother's dazes: 6.
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