Film Review: Otherhood

Director: Cindy Chupack

Starring: Angela Bassett, Patricia Arquette, Felicity Huffman 

Running time: 100 mins

The initial idea for Otherhood is fairly solid – focus on the older woman who finds herself adrift in a sea of uncertainty as her purpose (family) and desires in life (to be valued by said family) are called into question, making her ask herself who she really is. There’s always a time and a place for a film like that. But this one in particular is possibly the blandest and most emotionally stunted offerings to the genre that I’ve ever come across, and it left me feeling like I had watched something half formed and badly put together.

The drama focuses around three friends, now in their late forties/early fifties who first bonded through all having only sons the same age at school. Now that their sons have all moved out and grown up, these women have been left in their empty nests with a lack of purpose and dissatisfaction in life. The realisation has crept up on them that their sons no longer care about them enough to remember Mother’s Day. So they hatch a plan to take a road trip and spring a surprise visit on their offspring and effectively make them care again. 

It’s not a bad plot-line and has the potential for some funny moments, but there were some big problems. To put it bluntly, none of the characters (apart from Angela Bassett) were nice people. There was an emotional deficit in their general behaviour to each other, mothers to sons, sons to mothers, girlfriends/boyfriends to mothers-in-law, you get the general picture. This made it very hard to empathise with any of them, and invest properly in any of the characters and their development. It felt like there was a series of major gaps in the make up of each character, not enough information about their personal histories and experiences to justify such poor behaviour. And so the characters appeared illogical, unpleasant and frankly uninteresting.  This may be purely down to a particularly poorly written script, as the dialogue does seem very clunky and unrealistic. 

I was also left with some unanswered questions. Some of the relationships seemingly develop out of nowhere and with no build up. The character of Helen (Felicity Huffman) doesn’t make much sense - being a completely obnoxious and selfish woman who is pathologically unable to see anyone else’s point of view, nobody in their right mind would actually be friends with her. And apart from right at the beginning and right at the end, the sons who are supposed to be best friends share absolutely no screen time together. Why is that? There is a lot about this film that just doesn’t add up. If you decide to watch it, then watch it for the sake of Angela Bassett’s performance, which was the only heart-felt one, and the only one with any depth, in the whole film. I wouldn’t recommend it on the basis of either Felicity Huffman or Patricia Arquette – the latter of whom made me question my memory of True Romance and wonder if she had ever been any good at acting or whether I’d imagined it all. I think that, as much as anything, is as good a reason as any to just not bother.

Did you know? Viola Davis, Diane Keaton and Michelle Pfeiffer were originally cast as the leads.

Otherhood is on Netflix UK now