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Release date:
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April 29, 2016
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Director:
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Garry Marshall
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Cast:
Language:
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Jennifer Aniston,
Julia Roberts, Kate Hudson, Jason Sudeikis, Timothy Olyphant, Shay Mitchell, Britt
Robertson, Jack Whitehall, Sarah Chalke, Margo Martindale, Hector Elizondo, Aasif
Mandvi, Robert Pine
English
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The things star
power can persuade us to do. This weekend, the combined allure of Julia
Roberts, Jennifer Aniston and Kate Hudson drew me to a theatre on a maniacally busy,
I-don’t-have-time-to-breathe sort of day to watch Garry Marshall’s Mother’s Day.
It is not that the
film held out the promise of being another Pretty
Woman, Marshall’s career-defining 1990 film that made Roberts a household
name. It did not. Mother’s
Day is in the same league as the director’s Valentine’s Day (2010) and New
Year’s Eve (2011), with an all-star ensemble cast and multi-strand format.
With three female
leads, one male lead and a couple at the centre of the action, Mother’s Day is less crowded than those
other two films. The quality, however, is many steps down, which says a lot
considering that V-Day and NYE were just timepass fare. Hopefully this
brings to a close the director’s fixation on festival-related relationship sagas.
God, please make him stop at a trilogy. A quartet will be beyond endurance.
Aniston here plays interior
designer Sandy, a middle-aged, divorced mother of two young boys, who gets
along well with her ex-husband Henry (Timothy Olyphant). Her travails in the
film revolve around Henry’s unexpected announcement that he has married the young-enough-to-be-his-daughter
Tina (Shay Mitchell from TV’s Pretty
Little Liars).
Sandy’s friend
Jesse (Hudson) and her sister Gabi (Sarah Chalke, familiar again to Indian
viewers primarily from TV’s Scrubs)
are having relationship troubles of their own. Both are keeping crucial secrets
from their overbearing, prejudiced parents.
Meanwhile, Sandy
bumps into a fitness trainer called Bradley (Jason Sudeikis). He is a widower
with two daughters and is still pining for his wife (Jennifer Garner) who
passed away an entire year back, so you know from 10 miles away where that thread
is headed.
On the professional
front, Sandy is sought out for a design project by Lance Wallace (Hector
Elizondo), agent of the hugely successful writer-entrepreneur Miranda
(Roberts).
Elsewhere in the
same town, as Mother’s Day approaches, Jesse’s friend Kristin (Britt Robertson)
is hesitant to marry the father of her baby, her comedian boyfriend Zack (Jack
Whitehall), for reasons yet undisclosed, although she is very much in love with
him.
Mother’s Day is clearly intended as a light-hearted yet
emotional look at womanhood, motherhood and parenthood in general as the day
commemorating maternity approaches. Its Achilles heel is its other obvious
intention: to manipulate us by any means available.
To be fair, the
film is harmless fun in the first half even when it is not being particularly
original. Besides, Aniston, Hudson, Roberts and Sudeikis are so likeable that
it is near-impossible not to succumb to their appeal, even if Roberts is given
surprisingly little to do in comparison with the others and her body looks
impossibly padded up to make her look older for reasons that will become evident
when you see the film.
But as the second
half rolls along, Mother’s Day gets
mushier and progressively more emotionally calculated, till it feels as though
Marshall is not aiming at even an iota of depth. Perhaps he feels secure in the
knowledge that audiences are easily pleased when so much charisma and beauty are
on display. Perhaps, like generations of Hindi filmmakers, he feels the mere
mention of Maaaaa is enough to reduce
us to messy puddles of tears.
He is right up to a
point (I confess). But even a schmaltzy-pretty combine can go only so far when
the writing is so lazy and so transparent in its effort to pull at the heartstrings.
The bottom-of the-barrel
moment of maudlin manipulativeness comes towards the end when Zack goes on
stage with his baby in his arms during a comedy contest, delivers just one
funny line in his entire routine, yet wins, no doubt on the strength of the kid’s
cuteness alone. Apparently, his audience is as easily pleased as the one
Marshall is targeting with Mother’s Day.
The shameless mushiness
leads to an unintentionally amusing moment at one point when the baby’s Mummy, Kristin,
confides in Jesse that she was given up for adoption by her birth mother. “I
have abandonment issues,” she says in a weepy voice that is unwittingly
hilarious.
While parts of the
film are purportedly liberal, Roberts’ character Miranda uses the word “career”
as if it means “that thing women do to fill up an emotional void” or “the thing
that leaves women with no time to have romantic relationships and children”. She
says it twice in a tone that suggests these implications are obvious.
Mother’s Day is silly. It is a measure of the cast’s collective
charm that the film is not entirely unbearable.
Rating
(out of five): *1/2
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CBFC Rating (India):
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U/A
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Running time:
MPAA Rating (US):
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119 minutes
PG-13 (for
language and some suggestive material)
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Release date in US:
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April 29, 2016
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Photograph
courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day_(2016_film)
