Lil Mama

(On TV, June 2021) Criticism-by-comparison is rarely fair, but it’s almost mandatory to mention the similarities between Fruits of the Heart and the Oscar-winning Terms of Endearment. The basics are unerringly similar: Both films are about the relationship between a mother and her daughter through many years, with an old-fashioned weeper of a conclusion to make sure that viewers understand that this is meant as drama. Even if we accept that Fruits of the Heart’s writer/director Coke Daniels may not be aware of the earlier film, comparisons between the two are not to its advantage — and I say that as someone who didn’t particularly care for Terms of Endearment. For one thing, the tone of Fruits of the Heart is all over the place, going from comedy to drama to romance to hard-hitting tragedy. There are basic credibility problems (such as the mother’s vast mansion without the means of supporting it) that exacerbate some chaotic plotting that seems even more arbitrary in the context of squeezing years of melodrama in less than two hours. Things happen, but the time-skips make those developments seem more arbitrary than organic — if there’s a kind of story that called for a miniseries, this would be it. I’m not normally so harsh on BET Original movies (there’s a reason why I keep watching them, after all), and to be fair, there are some interesting things here. There’s some visual style that could have been developed further. Dorien Wilson plays what feels like a fun supporting character that becomes annoying the moment he tries to become a main character. Lil Mama and Wendy Raquel Robinson make for good anchors for the rest of the film. But ultimately, the constant swerves of Fruits of the Heart’s change of tone are a bit hard to follow, and the ultimate aim of making viewers burst into tears does feel unwarranted by the material that precedes it. It’s a mess, and a waste as well — there are many ways the story could have gone in more satisfying ways. Terms of Endearment, it isn’t.