MOTHER’S DAY – Review

Sappiness overflows in MOTHER’S DAY, an assembly-line rom-com with little on its mind beyond clichés and predictable formula. 81-year old director Garry Marshall, still mining the calendar after the similar NEW YEAR’S EVE and VALENTINE’S DAY, has gathered a bouquet of celebrity movie stars including Julia Roberts, Jennifer Aniston, Jason Sudeikis, and Kate Hudson, and shuffled them into tiresome skits about motherhood gone right and wrong. MOTHER’S DAY is a shallow and sickly-sweet offering best avoided.

Jennifer Aniston has the largest role in MOTHER’S DAY as Sandy, a divorced mother of two sons whose ex-husband Henry (Timothy OIyphant) has married the much younger Tina (Shay Mitchell), who tries too hard to be a cool stepmom. The story jumps between Sandy’s dilemma and those of a dozen others, such as childless Miranda (Julia Roberts), an uptight QVC superstar who has motherhood forced on her by the sudden appearance of Kristin (Britt Robertson), the daughter she gave up for adoption as a teen. Kristin is a mom herself, yet has commitment issues with her Brit boyfriend Zack (Jake Whitehall), a bartender who aspires to be a stand-up comic. Gabi and Jesse (Sarah Chalke and Kate Hudson) are sisters who live next door to each other and who have for years hidden their respective mates  from their narrow-minded parents (Margo Martindale and Robert Pine) who unexpectedly show up at their door (Gabi is married to another woman and Jesse to an Indian doctor). Then there’s gym owner Bradley (Jason Sudeikis), struggling to move on with his love life a year after the death of his wife (Jennifer Garner in a bizarre cameo) while trying to figure the best way to celebrate Mother’s Day with his two young daughters, the older of which (Jessi Case) is having her own first go at romance. There are other characters on hand including John Lovitz as a sad sack comedy club owner, Loni Love as Bradley’s sassy black friend (‘cuz every lame comedy must have one) and, since this is a Gerry Marshall film, 80-year old Hector Elizondo as Lance, Miranda’s sage personal assistant who doles out the expected platitudes about motherly love.

MOTHER’S DAY, one of those bland Hollywood star machines that bears no resemblance to the real world, feels like it’s been cynically conceived by a studio marketing brain trust. Director Marshall seems to hope that with all the sugary distractions you won’t notice that every skit is lame, every line of dialogue is stale, and every joke falls flat – even the ones at the comedy club (heck, especially the ones at the comedy club!). Although the cast manages to inject some personality from time to time, each plot strand is so constrained by the rom-com structure that it has nowhere to go. There’s no real conflict or edge. The film’s sole serious crisis involves a missing inhaler for an asthmatic kid who’s endangered for about 30 seconds. This is lazy screenwriting by the numbers. Is it really still funny to mock old people’s lack of computer savvy? We get the scene where Bradley’s at the store buying his teen girl’s tampons and the checkout girl has to compound his embarrassment by getting a price check over the P.A. (Michael Keaton did this exact gag better in MR. MOM in 1983 but at least this time they’re eco-friendly organic cotton tampons – how progressive!). MOTHER’S DAY is so desperate for laughs that it runs outtakes/bloopers during the closing credits, a device that hasn’t been funny since Burt Reynolds stopped doing it in the late ‘70s. Margo Martindale and Robert Pine have some funny moments as Gabi and Jesse’s bigoted parents (they’re from Texas of course), but they seem like they’ve dropped in from a different, broader comedy. “You’ve got a towel-head for a husband!?!” shouts dad, but I guess since he’s referring to an Indian, that is considered (by the screenwriters) loveable racism (good thing they didn’t make Jesse’s husband a black guy!). Pine is introduced sucking on a fried chicken leg and Martindale has a cute scene with her half-Indian grandson (“I see why they call you Tanner”). They spend most of the film parked in front of their daughter’s homes in a massive RV which leads to a unique chase through an Atlanta suburb involving that vehicle and a parade float built by the lesbian couple that’s a giant pink birth canal.

It’s easy to be cynical about a movie like MOTHER’S DAY, one that I’m sure a lot of women will end up enjoying. There are some tart lines mixed with the schmaltz, and it’s certainly easy on the eyes, with a supersized collection of pretty stars (though Ms Roberts looks clownish in that weird red wig). Ultra-sweet, safe and sporadically heartwarming, MOTHER’S DAY will no doubt be bulletproof at the box office.

1 and 1/2 of 5 Stars