Mother (1996)

(In French, On Cable TV, August 2022) I keep watching James L. Brooks films thinking that I should enjoy them more, and Mother is not an exception to this feeling. While writer-director-actor Brooks takes on more difficult material than others, and often goes for sly irony over easier ways of making people laugh, Mother feels like many of his other films in that it fails to satisfy. It already starts on a shaky note, as a freshly divorced Science Fiction writer drives from Los Angeles to San Fransico to regroup at his mother’s place. (Amusingly enough, the driving montage is set to a remake of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Miss Robinson” with on-the-nose plot-reflecting lyrics.) Except that he doesn’t like her, and she often doesn’t think all that highly of him. Brooks and Debbie Reynolds have some fun playing off a dysfunctional mother/son relationship, and that’s much of Mother for you: bickering over trivial details like the detestable petty characters they are, until it’s time for the climax. When that climax comes, it almost feels like an insult: he discovers she once was an aspiring writer; he understands she dislikes him because he reminds her of her dashed literary aspirations and having had their epiphany, they part as new friends. If that’s a bit not enough for you, let’s just say that the film plays this absolutely straight, and adds in an adoring fan of the writer as a romantic envoi. And Brooks is supposed to be a wry, subtle writer? Have I missed anything? Watchable yet kind of infuriating, Mother strikes me as too much of the dumbest Hollywood pap. Strike another “I don’t think so” in Brook’s filmography.