Mother’s Day: Greeting Cardboard

By Katherine Monk

The best scene in Mother’s Day comes at the very end. It’s one of the bloopers thrown into the tail credits, and it features Julia Roberts sitting at a table in a restaurant, looking distant as a train rolls by.

The train keeps rolling, and rolling. “That’s one long f—ing train,” she finally says to the camera before finding her aloof performance face again. It’s all of fifteen seconds of footage, and it captures more humor, sincerity and female edge than anything we see in the two hours that precedes it because despite having a strong female cast that includes Roberts, Jennifer Aniston and Kate Hudson, Mother’s Day is a dud.

An over-processed parade of chick-oriented emotions delivered in one dimension, Mother’s Day is the kind of movie that makes you wonder how such a terrible script could have made it so far without anyone declaring it a stinker.

More incredible still, this steaming load of greeting card cliché was directed by Garry Marshall – the man who directed Roberts a quarter century ago in Pretty Woman, a candy-coated piece of formula rooted in sexist stereotype, but a competent piece of filmmaking nonetheless.

Mother’s Day tries to prove Marshall’s latter-day enlightenment by featuring a lesbian couple, a parade float shaped like a uterus, a cross-racial marriage, a mom in the armed forces and a bartender husband/comedian who doesn’t mind changing a diaper.

They are all nice gestures, but they’re entirely empty.

In fact, every character feels so vacuous, you can hear a dead echo between the lifeless lines as the editor tries to create chemistry from inert comedy, or craft tear-jerker diamonds from cubic zirconia material.

Everything feels contrived and forced, from the storyline about Kate Hudson and Aasif Mandvi’s secret bi-racial marriage, to the woefully shallow plot about a nice widower (Jason Sudeikis) who lost his hero wife (Jennifer Garner), presumably in battle.

There are a lot of holes in this cheap fabric of story that tries to cover off everything from parent-child dynamics to gender-based assumptions about romantic love, and because it’s so flimsy, it’s not surprising it starts to come apart early – just like Jennifer Aniston’s bitter mom character trying to accept her ex’s marriage to a much younger hottie.

Aniston and Roberts may be the two big names on the credits, but their parts are painful as one plays the sourpuss matron who still has feelings for the father of her children, and the other plays a home-shopping diva and self-help author with a secret daughter.

You can tell Roberts’s character is totally uptight based on the Anna Wintour-styled ginger bob and close-fitting frock. And you know Aniston’s character is supposed to be accessible and sympathetic because she wears workout clothes – or just happens to rip her silk blouse and make her bra visible before her big presentation.

It’s one sit-com gag after another, and it’s so tiresome, the only thing that holds your interest is the packaging: the perfectly ironed plaid shirts that Sudeikis sports in every scene, the high-end spandex supporting Aniston’s cleavage and the US magazine appeal of putting Kate Hudson and Jennifer Aniston in the same frame.

In fact, the whole movie feels like something you’d thumb through at the checkout as you throw your groceries on the conveyor: a glossy piece of escapism that tries to gain our respect by acknowledging gay people, but also includes a five-page spread of celebrity cellulite next to a recipe for Cobb Salad and a tip sheet on how to tidy up.

Like Mother’s Day itself, this Garry Marshall movie feels like a product created by a corporation to extract money from your pocketbook by pushing all the guilt and love buttons at once.

You can see them everywhere this time of year: Greeting cards with flowers and butterflies floating over hearts and hokey lines – something the lazy and unimaginative will inevitably purchase to appear considerate, but makes a neglible emotional impression because no one’s heart is in it.

@katherinemonk

THE EX-PRESS, April 29, 2016

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