I heard someone describe movies like Otherhood in a specific way. It’s like the pitch team didn’t expect to get Angela Bassett, Patricia Arquette, and Felicity Huffman to all agree to be in their movie…but they had to start the next day and finish by the end of the week. Such is the deficiency of Otherhood’s script, which wastes a fun idea and 3 terrific actresses, barely scratching the surface of what it wants to do or say.
Bassett, Arquette, and Huffman play Carol, Gillian, and Helen, 3 empty nesters living in Poughkeepsie. Each of them has a kid who’s living in New York City, and each of those kids has forgotten to call for Mother’s Day. Irritated and a little drunk, the 3 women go to the Big Apple to confront their kids, and also to learn a little about how their lives are going. You’ll be surprised to know that each of them might be struggling a tad…
There’s a depth of material Otherhood can feed off of to tell its story. There’s not enough good stories about what happens when people who devote their lives to raising kids all of a sudden find out they don’t have to anymore. Baked within an empty nester are stories about identity, parenting of adults, and middle aged relationships. Otherhood briefly touches on these subjects, but doesn’t seem interested in really exploring any of them. What the movie does instead is attempt to turn each scene into the punch line of a joke, or a build to a montage. Sometimes these jokes are funny, but more often than not, the jokes jarringly clash with the point of the scene, or the severity of the material, or the scene ends more abruptly than it should, and jarringly cuts to another of the ladies’ stories. Cindy Chupack, the writer/director, feels like she’s going for a Nora Ephron or Nancy Meyers vibe with her story, but Otherhood lacks the insight Meyers and Ephron bring their material.
That means Otherhood relies on Angela Bassett, Patricia Arquette, and Felicity Huffman to do the movie star thing: take subpar material and make it tolerable. Each of the 3 is at their best when they have to react to discoveries about their son’s lives that they did not know. Other than that? Only Angela Bassett salvages her storyline. Part of the reason is her story gives her the most to do, but also because Bassett has a power of presence that immediately makes you interested in what’s going on with her. Patricia Arquette and Felicity Huffman have less luck making you invest in their stories. Arquette gets the short straw on story: she only exists to help her son here. Huffman’s tries her best to get the audience to care about her poorly written character, but she comes off like a narcissistic jerk too often, and often an ignorant self-righteous one.
Otherhood clearly needs a do over. I think it’s cast correctly, and the premise is fine to jump start a movie. We just need Nancy Meyers to get her hands on this script and give it a good rewrite. First thing: maybe have the 3 women just….spend more time together? And I’d personally love to see Angela Bassett really dress down somebody in the next version of this script, please?