Wednesday, October 21, 2009

No Whining! Movie Review: Motherhood

We saw a free screening of Motherhood recently.

It was riddled with technology references, since the main character (Uma Thurman) blogs. It's modern! And cool! It speaks to me!

The movie takes us along with Uma Thurman's Eliza K. Welch in the course of a hectic day while she scrambles to accomplish a long to-do list in preparation for her daughter's birthday party.

Her children are actually incredibly well behaved, so I appreciated that the movie doesn't suggest that every single day of a parent's life will be marked by a screaming tantrum.

I didn't find the film especially significant, however. Eliza blogs her thoughts, which have varying degrees of profundity (just like on any blog), and also causes some trouble by mentioning a personal story about a friend whom she names. This seemed a bit unlikely to me (would anybody be that thoughtless?), but what do I know.

My own dear friend Muttonchops Wilkins once commented to me, while in the midst of a laughably complex plan to conceal the fact that he obtained his current high office through chicanery and lewd blackmail, that common blog etiquette dictates not writing about people by name if you're going to be telling personal tales. Oops.

It seemed to be trying to make some larger point about motherhood in general (my first clue was the title!), but I'm not sure it really got one across, to me anyway. I guess the message I saw was, motherhood is hard work, and sometimes frustrating, and it's tough to manage the changes in your own life and your children's lives and to negotiate the balance between who you are as you and who you are as a parent, but at the same time it's rewarding and wonderful. And taking the time to write or otherwise express yourself is important.

So blog! I guess.

And that's a fine and no doubt true message, if that's the message, but it's not really something we didn't already know. Life, hard, check.

Anyway, people who know (better than bon-bon-eating no-kids me) how tough it is to keep things going day to day in a busy life with children may find the movie reassuringly familiar, and it had some amusing bits. I felt in the end it didn't really amount to much, but it was a moderately entertaining "slice of someone's life" type film that people with little kids might relate to.

Libraries do not feature, but there are old books as well as blogs, and there was a limited health connection which restates the important message "careful what you let kids put in their mouths." (Not that you can completely control that.)

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