REVIEW 387: MOTHER’S DAY

Release date:	April 29, 2016
Director:	Garry Marshall
Cast: Language:	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

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time: MPAA Rating (US):	119 minutes  PG-13 (for language and some suggestive material)
Release date in US:	April 29, 2016

Photograph courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day_(2016_film)

  

REVIEW 190: THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST

Release date:	May 17, 2013
Director:	Mira Nair
Cast: Language:	Riz Ahmed, Kate Hudson, Liev Schreiber, Keifer Sutherland, Shabana Azmi, Om Puri English

If you are among those who’ve loved The Reluctant Fundamentalist by celebrated Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid, you may be tempted to slaughter me, but this is the honest-to-god truth: I found the book superficial, sometimes simplistic, often playing to the gallery in a way some people do while discussing a wronged minority, and it didn’t move me.

The reason why director Mira Nair’s film works is that it manages to be moving despite the protagonist’s seemingly flimsy motivations. Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (screen story by Hamid & Ami Bhogani, screenplay by William Wheeler) takes the skeletal conversation in the book between the Pakistani protagonist and an American man in a Lahore marketplace, and breathes life and feeling into it. From the distant figure in the cold-as-steel book, Changez Khan in the film becomes a living, breathing man whose post-9/11 journey draws you in.

A decade has passed since that apocalyptic day. Changez (Riz Ahmed) who once chased the American Dream on Wall Street in dapper suits is now back in Pakistan, bearded and in traditional attire, teaching at a local university. At a restaurant in Lahore, he recounts his life in the US to an American journalist (Liev Schreiber) while a cloud of suspicion hangs over his head regarding the kidnapping of a US citizen in the city. Using the flashback-through-an-interview-(or-is-it-an-interrogation?) format, the film takes us back in time with him to New York where he worked as a financial analyst. We meet his professional mentor Jim (Keifer Sutherland), we watch him fall in love with the emotionally conflicted Erica (Kate Hudson), and gradually, we also see that idyllic life unravel after the WTC attacks: we see him humiliated by a strip search at a US airport simply because he looks different, we see colleagues suddenly view him with suspicion, we witness another humiliating episode with the police, and we see the strain tell on his relationship with Erica.

The interesting difference between Changez’s story on page and on celluloid is the treatment of Erica which provides a lovely showcase for the misunderstandings that arise when a couple are dealing with external stresses. Was Changez over-reacting to Jessica’s art show or was a Pakistani boyfriend really a badge of honour for a bohemian artist to raise her “street cred”? His cruel words to her at that point, in a deliberate attempt to wound her, allows the story to depart from the book’s black-and-white interpretation of race relations in which the brown-skinned hero is not critiqued. There is also a moment of utter frankness when Changez describes his reflex reaction to 9/11 when he watched on television as the twin towers collapsed: Before conscience kicks in, have you never felt a split second of pleasure at arrogance brought low? … It's a flash of a feeling that may have been felt by many worldwide that political correctness would prevent most from articulating.

Pulsating through the story is some wonderful music that includes the ethereal sounds of Pakistani qawwals singing as the opening credits roll out. Nair’s well-chosen cast is headlined by the remarkable (and remarkably attractive) British Pakistani actor Riz Ahmed who plays Changez with a stoicism that never fails to convey the depths of his emotions. Kate Hudson with her flirty charm is a pleasant foil to his more guarded exterior. Schreiber, Sutherland and (in much briefer roles playing Changez’s parents) Shabana Azmi and Om Puri are spot-on. Even that Lahore marketplace is peopled with actors who deliver the occasional throwaway dialogue without being clichés of Pakistan.

Where the film does chuck a stereotype at us is with Changez’s workplace contemporaries. The only one who is supportive among them is the black guy while the white girl and boy eye him warily. Oh c’mon!!! So much more believable is the white boss Jim who hits the nail on the head when he urges Changez to snap out of his disillusionment with these words: If you throw a stone out of that window it will fall on a person who feels victimised. Maybe this – Changez’s relatively minor grievances – are the reason why it’s not easy to be convinced of his motivations for throwing away everything he’d worked so hard to achieve in the US. Wherever in the world you are, if you are a minority you will face prejudice of some sort. Do Changez’s actions suggest that instead of fighting this prejudice, we must run away from it?

 

Well, a difference of opinion with the protagonist is no reason to dislike a film. That we are provided a counterpoint via Jim is good enough. People have been embittered by far less than what Changez went through. Those who justify racial profiling by America’s security apparatus should realise the harm it causes. Changez’s experiences are a far cry from the tragedies that befell the heroes of that gorgeous Pakistani film Khuda Ke Liye and Bollywood’s poignant New York…but Changez too is a reality. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is not in the league of Nair’s best films, Salaam Bombay and Monsoon Wedding, but it’s thoughtful and thought-provoking all the same. For that and for Riz Ahmed, it’s definitely worth a watch.

Rating (out of five): ***1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time: MPAA Rating (US):	137 minutes R (for language, some violence and brief sexuality)
Release date in the US:	April 26, 2013

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reluctant_Fundamentalist_(film)

Official trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SQs2Y8drP8