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Grade: D
Watching Motherhood, in which Uma Thurman plays a Manhattan mom juggling kids, dog, marriage and blogging duties, I could not help but recall some of the many distinguished literary explorations of similar predicaments: A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf; Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Yellow Wallpaper; the poems of Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich; and especially the short stories of Grace Paley, set in the same West Village streets through which Thurman's character, Eliza Welch, steers her Volvo and schleps her stroller.
It would be nice to be able to place Motherhood, written and directed by Katherine Dieckmann, in such exalted company. Unfortunately the reason it may remind you of other books and films is that you'll need something to occupy your thoughts while watching. Motherhood seems to suffer from its heroine's tendency toward distraction.
Eliza is scattered, ambivalent, flaky and inconsistent -- all of which is fine, and energetically conveyed by Thurman. But what are tolerable quirks in person can be deadly to a narrative, and Dieckmann, trying for observational nuance, descends into trivia and wishful thinking.
At first things seem to promise otherwise. In a lovely opening sequence, Eliza wakes up in the pale morning light and the silence of a sleeping household. She makes coffee and checks her to-do list, a motley assortment of child-care and domestic tasks punctuated by the word -- more a plea than an imperative -- blog. Eliza, who we later learn was once a promising writer of literary fiction, now compiles her maternal thoughts on the Internet.
Her site is called the Bjorn Identity, playing on a popular brand of infant-carrier, and that labored, nonsensical pun -- wasn't there a mattress store on Seinfeld called the Lumbar Yard? -- is unfortunately typical of both Eliza's writing and Dieckmann's. The dialogue creaks with self-consciousness, and its insights have the tinny ring of greeting-card sentiments rendered in air quotes.
Eliza has an absent-minded, bookish husband (Anthony Edwards), a toddler son and an almost 6-year-old daughter, whose birthday party will be the denouement of a long and hectic day. In the meantime there are party supplies and a cake to pick up and a smattering of urban-parent rituals to attend to. The car must be moved for alternate-side parking. A furtive cigarette or two needs to be smoked. A friend (Minnie Driver, always welcome) is available for shopping and the sharing of confidences. And of course there is a city full of other mothers, who are not sisters so much as rivals in a ruthlessly competitive enterprise that makes the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange look like a tea party.
There is the aggressive playground helicopter, swooping in to take offense when Eliza says something to her belligerent little darling. There is the emo-eco-extremist, obsessively monitoring her child's food and feelings. There is the snooty French neighbor, who cloaks her disapproval for Eliza's bohemian disorder in tones of pity and admiration. All of them think they are better than Eliza, and of course she returns the favor. Eliza may radiate flaky entitlement, but she also is, in the movie's fuzzy terms and in her own muddled mind, a model of authenticity and sensitivity in a cold, phony world.
So you have to root for her to make it through the day and find some measure of equanimity in her messy, unbalanced life. And of course you do -- Thurman is impossible to dislike -- but without really believing in that life or feeling as if you've learned anything about what is really at stake. The humor is soft, the dramas are small, and the movie stumbles from loose and scruffy naturalism to sitcom tidiness.
Throughout her day Eliza is trying to write a 500-word essay -- it's for a too-good-to-be-true contest sponsored by a parent magazine -- about what motherhood means to her. She may have some trenchant thoughts on the subject, but Motherhood itself has shockingly little to say.
Watching Motherhood, in which Uma Thurman plays a Manhattan mom juggling kids, dog, marriage and blogging duties, I could not help but recall some of the many distinguished literary explorations of similar predicaments: A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf; Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Yellow Wallpaper; the poems of Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich; and especially the short stories of Grace Paley, set in the same West Village streets through which Thurman's character, Eliza Welch, steers her Volvo and schleps her stroller.
It would be nice to be able to place Motherhood, written and directed by Katherine Dieckmann, in such exalted company. Unfortunately the reason it may remind you of other books and films is that you'll need something to occupy your thoughts while watching. Motherhood seems to suffer from its heroine's tendency toward distraction.
Eliza is scattered, ambivalent, flaky and inconsistent -- all of which is fine, and energetically conveyed by Thurman. But what are tolerable quirks in person can be deadly to a narrative, and Dieckmann, trying for observational nuance, descends into trivia and wishful thinking.
At first things seem to promise otherwise. In a lovely opening sequence, Eliza wakes up in the pale morning light and the silence of a sleeping household. She makes coffee and checks her to-do list, a motley assortment of child-care and domestic tasks punctuated by the word -- more a plea than an imperative -- blog. Eliza, who we later learn was once a promising writer of literary fiction, now compiles her maternal thoughts on the Internet.
Her site is called the Bjorn Identity, playing on a popular brand of infant-carrier, and that labored, nonsensical pun -- wasn't there a mattress store on Seinfeld called the Lumbar Yard? -- is unfortunately typical of both Eliza's writing and Dieckmann's. The dialogue creaks with self-consciousness, and its insights have the tinny ring of greeting-card sentiments rendered in air quotes.
Eliza has an absent-minded, bookish husband (Anthony Edwards), a toddler son and an almost 6-year-old daughter, whose birthday party will be the denouement of a long and hectic day. In the meantime there are party supplies and a cake to pick up and a smattering of urban-parent rituals to attend to. The car must be moved for alternate-side parking. A furtive cigarette or two needs to be smoked. A friend (Minnie Driver, always welcome) is available for shopping and the sharing of confidences. And of course there is a city full of other mothers, who are not sisters so much as rivals in a ruthlessly competitive enterprise that makes the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange look like a tea party.
There is the aggressive playground helicopter, swooping in to take offense when Eliza says something to her belligerent little darling. There is the emo-eco-extremist, obsessively monitoring her child's food and feelings. There is the snooty French neighbor, who cloaks her disapproval for Eliza's bohemian disorder in tones of pity and admiration. All of them think they are better than Eliza, and of course she returns the favor. Eliza may radiate flaky entitlement, but she also is, in the movie's fuzzy terms and in her own muddled mind, a model of authenticity and sensitivity in a cold, phony world.
So you have to root for her to make it through the day and find some measure of equanimity in her messy, unbalanced life. And of course you do -- Thurman is impossible to dislike -- but without really believing in that life or feeling as if you've learned anything about what is really at stake. The humor is soft, the dramas are small, and the movie stumbles from loose and scruffy naturalism to sitcom tidiness.
Throughout her day Eliza is trying to write a 500-word essay -- it's for a too-good-to-be-true contest sponsored by a parent magazine -- about what motherhood means to her. She may have some trenchant thoughts on the subject, but Motherhood itself has shockingly little to say.
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