Not quite the Hangover?
Bad Moms is the story of three mothers who have been near perfect in parenting and growing up in their marital relations. Each one of them has been married for over a decade now with teenage children. It’s a standard mid- life crisis movie that is slightly blown out of proportion and labelled inappropriately to get some attention. If you were expecting it to go to the lengths of Hangover then you would be disappointed.
When Jon Lucas thought of reverse engineering the Hangover series and giving it a feminist outlook, little did he know what he was taking up, Bad Moms is a very sad film. If you can see past the surface jokes, the cheerful banter of the three women who seemingly are good moms, despite doing everything to spoil that image.
Amy Mitchell ( Mila Kunis) made the worst decision of her life and married a complete loser. Given her character and her presence in the story, one cannot fathom how she would have fallen in love with this guy and then had two seemingly perfect kids. One fine day she snaps out and ends the relationship as she gets to know that her husband is cheating on her. Call it a terrible bad casting decision, or a really convoluted plot where you setup a character to fail simply to make your protagonist rise. Their separation was as if you would separate water from oil, and one does wonder how were they together in the first place.
Gwendolyn ( Christina Applegate), the seemingly perfect mom, is a ruptured soul from inside, but she is a rich woman and wants to have control in her life even if it means messing up with teenagers, framing them up to take out personal vendetta. The trouble with the movie is that everything is on a surface level; superficial. While there is no denying the fact that real mothers are overworked and stressed out, working women have so much on their plate that it becomes difficult for them to even take care of themselves, there is no way one can believe even an ounce of such pressure in Bad Moms.
What the movie lacks in terms of an intelligent portrayal is made up by giving a good show of moms going wild, drinking cheap wine and checking out men at bars. This is a fantastical imagination, emerging from the cosmopolitan nature of our modern lives. There is also a casual discussion about the different kinds of male paraphernalia, and the women are really good at objectification of men. It’s delicious, not objectionable. Mila Kunis looks so adorable trying to find a date and get laid. Forgiving the movie of its shortsightedness, one can enjoy the movie for its use of adult vocabulary, visual innuendos and some nightly jokes. It is funny in parts and overtly suggestive in some. It does give you few reasons to relax a little, embrace the imperfections, and stop trying to control everything. But it fails terribly when it implies that another mom, who has a personal issue with your mom, can mess up your life as an ambitious child. Is it really that simple?
Don’t jump and leave the theatre when the credits come up, the closing of the film has an emotional sequence, when all the moms in the movie are with their real moms sharing some of their childhood memories.
Parenting is indeed a difficult task, and the trouble is that making a film about something so complicated will always have these challenges. It calls for a deeper introspection and understanding of the persona of a mother, and not top of the mind exaggeration of clichéd jokes and situations.
The writer is founder, Lightcube Film Society