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Jennifer Aniston is the best mother in Mother’s Day
C-In case anyone has forgotten, Garry Marshall got his start on television, creating The Odd Couple, Laverne & Shirley, and Mork & Mindy, among others. His latest feature film, Mother’s Day, however, recalls a different popular series. Just imagine a holiday-themed episode of The Love Boat without Issac, Julie, Gopher, and the ocean, but with Julia Roberts wearing a ridiculous Buster Brown wig instead.
Mother’s Day has several intersecting story lines, all taking place immediately before the holiday. The most prominent story concerns newly single mom Sandy (Jennifer Aniston), who is upset after her husband Henry (Timothy Olyphant) leaves her for a younger woman that her two sons take to immediately, to her chagrin. Bradley (Jason Sudeikis) is also facing his first Mother’s Day as a single parent, but he’s still unable to come to terms with his wife’s death. Then, there are sisters Jesse (Kate Hudson) and Gabi (Sarah Chalke), who have married a man from India (Aasif Mandvi) and a woman (Cameron Esposito) respectively, and must break the news to their extremely intolerant parents (Margot Martindale and Robert Pine).
Admittedly, you wouldn’t have seen a lesbian couple on The Love Boat, but the other crises in Mother’s Day are exactly the sort that got worked out over the course of a week’s cruise en route to a huggy-feely finale. Along the way to the film’s extremely predictable ending, the script (credited to Marshall and four other screenwriters with one previous credit among them) dispenses fortune cookie philosophy (“We’re not who the world thinks we are; we decide who we are”) and a mix of decades old humor (dad-buying-tampon jokes and an out-of-control RV) with lame social media riffs (“did she just say tweet at me”). Still, Marshall was smart enough to give Jennifer Aniston the most screen time, and she wears her emotions on her sleeve, overcoming the lame one-liners and establishing the one credible parent-child dynamic in the movie. The other effective (and generally funny) performer is British comic Jack Whitehall, who enters an open-mike comedy competition using some genuinely funny and heartfelt one-liners about his girlfriend and her special relationship with their daughter. The convenient story resolutions in Mother’s Day strain credulity to the breaking point, but Marshall understands his target audience (families looking for holiday schmaltz) and delivers a movie that’s like a Hallmark card. Mother’s Day is simplistic and only fitfully amusing, but it does allow the audience to reaffirm their own feelings about dear old mom.
Continue reading on Mother’s Day: Mini-review
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