There are “Bad Moms” in all their well-meaning comedy chaos, and then there are those movie mothers who reject the parental role for reasons the audience may never fully understand. “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” the new Richard Linklater/Cate Blanchett film based on the bestselling Maria Semple novel, brings us into a Be Reel category of movie moms who decide they want more than what society (real or imagined) tells them they deserve.
This week, we’re also looking at 2015’s “Ricki and the Flash” and last year’s “Second Act.” The former, for the uninitiated, was Jonathan Demme’s final dramatic feature before his death: it follows a cover-band frontwoman (Meryl Streep) who revisits the Indiana family she left behind in pursuit of a music career decades before. Then “Second Act,” by far the biggest hit of these three, is a Jennifer Lopez vehicle about a big-box store manager with all the skills to thrive at the corporate level but none of the “right” history—parental or educational (no spoilers here, at least).
So, of course, we’ve got topical movie questions today:
- Was “Bernadette” doomed to be a box office failure from the start?
- What Richard Linklater film feels the least like a Linklater film?
- Where does “Ricki and the Flash” fall in the pantheon of Meryl Streep’s singing roles?
But then we dig in thematically: Would these films all achieve greater insight if they, in fact, weren’t told from the mothers’ perspectives? Is the age-old fallacy that moms can’t work and raise kids still hamstringing these movies? Or is it more problematic that they can’t shake the idea maybe these women don’t want to be mothers at all?
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