Moms, brides taking over the big screens
Wave of female-friendship comedies good, but many want to see it branch out
We open on a sweeping aerial shot of suburbia, close-ups of spotless kitchens and buckled minivan carseats.
But soon motherhood turns to debauchery. Vodka is guzzled, cars are wrecked and at least one obligatory high-heeled slow-mo sequence is indulged.
These are scenes from an emerging sub-genre of the “female buddy comedy” — moms gone wild. Hollywood can’t seem to get enough of overworked and underappreciated mothers pushed to the brink: from the earnest Christian flop Moms’ Night Out in 2014, to this year’s Fun Mom Dinner (out next month) and A Bad Moms Christmas (in theatres in November), the sequel to last year’s Bad Moms.
For some, the films are welcome additions to the boom of female-led comedy — from 2011’s Bridesmaids to this summer’s Rough Night — but some critics say those same movies are regressive, too often about privileged white women celebrating marriage and motherhood.
“We need to allow women to break out of the boxes — out of the mom box,” says Melissa Silverstein, founder of womenandhollywood.com. “I want more science stories, I want more stories about people in the workplace, things like that.” But when women are more than wives and mothers onscreen, there is often backlash, Silverstein says, noting the controversy surrounding last year’s all-female Ghostbusters remake and recent news that the BBC’s Dr. Who had cast its first female lead. “When you do a mom movie you’re in much safer territory in terms of how the culture depicts women,” she says. “( Ghostbusters) got lost in the backlash story. This is what happens when women break out of the box.”
So the characters remain largely brides-to-be (see Bridesmaids, 2012’s Bachelorette and this year’s Rough Night) and, more than ever in 2017, moms. In the new Fun Mom Dinner, a harmless night away from the kids gets out of hand. The dads, left at home (to “babysit,” as one of them says in the trailer), get locked out of the house while their wives get high and sing karaoke. In 2014’s Moms’ Night Out, a similar innocuous dinner goes awry, leading to cops and car chases.
In last year’s Bad Moms, which grossed more than $180 million (U.S.) worldwide, Mila Kunis stars as a young mother fighting for the Parent-Teacher Association presidency. In the process, she rebels against traditional motherhood alongside Kristen Bell and Kathryn Hahn: cue boozy house party and slow-mo squad walk. Later this year, it seems the trio will rebel against the pressure of the holidays:
“Let’s take Christmas back,” Kunis declares in the trailer for A Bad Moms Christmas.
If the “moms gone wild” genre has an origin story, it begins with 2011’s Bridesmaids and culminates with last year’s Bad Moms.
“These are an offshoot of Bridesmaids . . . raunchy female-centric group comedies have become a trend,” Silverstein says, joking that she can hear somebody somewhere in a Hollywood office shouting, “‘Get me the next script you have that’s funny women who are moms.’ Then you get the next five movies,” she says. “Bad Moms was only a year ago and now we already have a couple more.”
There’s nothing inherently wrong about showcasing mom characters, says Nichole Edwards, a women’s studies and sociology professor at Western University, particularly when the women band together. “We’re always pitted against each other,” she says.
But along with that theme of sisterhood comes a more problematic teachable moment. When Kunis’s character finally takes time for herself and chooses to be a “bad mom,” everything falls apart. Her kids resent her and move in with dad. She loses her part-time job.
“As soon as any of those women start to develop identities outside of ‘mom,’ they become bad moms,” Edwards says.
There are some movies in the “female buddy comedy” genre that expand the character profile beyond wives and mothers, particularly films by Paul Feig, an outspoken supporter of female-driven movies.
Feig directed the acclaimed Kristen Wiig-starring Bridesmaids, which made more than $288 million worldwide in 2011.
Since that genre-defining moment, Feig directed movies about female cops ( The Heat), spies ( Spy), and physicists and engineers ( Ghostbusters). Still, Feig looks poised to join the mom-genre train with his next project, an adaptation of the novel A Simple Favor about a “mommy blogger.”
Toronto actress and mom Nicole Martin says she’s no June Cleaver, but found little to identify with in Bad Moms.
“I honestly have no time to ‘party’ with other mom friends ever. Most of my friends are from the professional world,” she says, calling the depictions of motherhood in these films stereotypical. “I prefer films that take me by surprise, instead of meeting expectations.”
Martin has found a wider variety of roles in the theatre setting. “In television and film for sure the characters are in boxes,” she says. “When you go for a mother role, often that’s the name of the character — ‘mother.’ ”
Of the new female buddy comedy films, only Girls Trip, in theatres now, seems to subvert expectations. It follows a group of Black women not on a bachelorette trip or taking a breather from motherhood. Instead, they’re friends on a trip to the Essence Festival, where one of them is the keynote speaker. For Women & Hollywood founder Silverstein, who is also the artistic director of the all-female Athena Film Festival, diverse depictions of women like Girls Trip couldn’t come at a better moment. Outside of Hollywood, she sees women’s rights newly threatened, giving rise to calls for activism and events such as the Women’s March in January.
“Right now we’re in a period where there is extreme pushback on independent women — women’s ideas, thoughts, sexuality — everything. Any successes where we see women putting their voices out there and being funny and doing things that the dominant culture is now pushing back on is big and important,” Silverstein says.
“Let’s expand our imagination of what women can be.”