Cindy Chupack’s Otherhood attempts to explore empty nest syndrome in the millennial era, with children not only out of the house but scattered to the winds and so used to communication via social media and text that they cannot even be bothered to call home. That negligence undergirds our introduction to three longtime friends: Carol (Angela Bassett), Gillian (Patricia Arquette) and Helen (Felicity Huffman) meet up on Mother’s Day in their Poughkeepsie neighborhood to celebrate the day as their sons send no more than a perfunctory text. Their conversation is filled with hyperbolic, Lifetime-ready cheer and corny jokes, though things get realer when Carol admits that she sent her Mother’s Day flowers to herself, complete with a note, as her own son would never do something so thoughtful. That abrupt shift from the unbearably broad to the quietly wounded immediately summarizes the strengths and pitfalls of the movie before it even truly begins.
Amped up on their shared outrage (and bourbon), the women decide to trek to New York City to visit their children uninvited. At first, only Carol has the courage to actually visit her son, Matt (Sinqua Walls), who reacts to her presence with only slightly more enthusiasm than he might have greeted a Jehovah’s Witness. Carol opts to set up camp in his apartment, proceeding to pass judgment on Matt’s job, aversion to relationships and lifestyle, but her friends ultimately wreak even more havoc. Helen heads to see Paul (Jake Lacy), whom she knows is gay though he never came out to her, a distinction that clearly colors their relationship as Helen overcompensates with passive-aggressive kindness upon meeting Paul’s gay friends and partner that airs grievances over the emotional distance that she feels with her child. Gillian comes to see her boy, Daniel (Jake Hoffman) on the heels of a messy breakup with his girlfriend, Erin (Heidi Gardner), to whom he was going to propose until he caught her in an affair. Taking it upon herself to simultaneously reassure Daniel that everything will be okay, criticize Erin and set her son up with a new, better woman, Gillian steamrolls over Daniel’s visible depression out of faith in her own meddling.
The tension that thus erupts between the mothers and their sons is predicated on cringe humor of the women barging past any and all social cues to embarrass their kids. Bassett and Huffman play their roles with intense exaggeration, making all of Carol’s and Helen’s behavior chaotic. Carol’s habit of casually divulging all of her criticisms of Matt’s loose lifestyle to his coworkers, or Helen’s baffling offense that Paul donated sperm to a lesbian couple are played at a volume that clashes with Chupack’s hands-off direction. The scene of Helen exploding over Paul’s donation, screaming “Sperm!’ repeatedly in a crowded restaurant, has the frantic energy of farce but looks like a twee, sunny dramedy. The sharp, irreconcilable contrast between the film’s bland look and functional direction and the over-the-top stylings of its actors renders Otherhood fatally at odds with itself. Only Arquette plays her role in the appropriate gear, giving Gillian’s overbearing attempts to fix her son’s life with a calm, almost instinctive meddlesomeness that recalls Debbie Reynolds’s comical but lived-in performance in Albert Brooks’ Mother. When Gillian arranges a rebound date for Daniel that she later learns went horribly, she airily says “well, sometimes the second date is where the magic happens” as much to herself as to her exhausted son.
Yet as bad as the film is as a comedy, as a drama about the pain of getting older and seeing the people against whom we define ourselves growing apart from us, Otherhood can be earnestly affecting. Apart from their relationship issues with their sons, all three women deal with the fallout of romantic trauma, be it Carol’s widowing or the affair that ended Helen’s marriage. There are moments here of great sensitivity, as when Carol mentions that she should throw out her old mattress because it still has the indent from where her late husband slept, but that if she did get a new one “it would no longer sag where he slept.” Likewise, Helen’s unaddressed wounds over Paul never coming out to her may come from a selfish place, but they also contain a hint of understandable sadness that Paul took her support for granted and thus never felt the need to confide in her. Otherhood is at its best when reflecting on the ways that defining oneself as a mother sacrifices by default one’s own sense of self to the development of an independent being whose own growth and change can permanently disrupt any notion of identity. It’s a complex subject handled with surprising tenderness in a film where Felicity Huffman screams “sperm” at the top of her voice.
The post Otherhood appeared first on Spectrum Culture.