Motherly love: 10 films for Mothers' Day

Mothers don't always get the best of representation in the movies. Often obsessive and controlling, or emotionally or physically absent, they are frequently seen through the eyes of their children.

Sometimes they are a frustrating obstacle to a teenager's newfound sense of independent purpose. Later in life, they can be someone to blame for when a child's life hasn't turned out as they expected.

There are examples of all of these mothers in the films I have selected but I hope there are some of the other kind too. The selfless, nurturing providers of unadulterated love and kindness. You know - like our mothers.

Mildred Pierce (1945)

Joan Crawford's own motherhood reputation took a savage hammering with the book (and film) Mommie Dearest but in 1945 she played one of the greatest - and most self-sacrificing - single mothers ever seen on screen.

Scorned by her social climbing daughter, Veda (Ann Blyth), Mildred furiously grows her restaurant business to provide the life her daughter thinks she wants. None of it is ever good enough, though, and it all ends in tears. Tears, and murder.

Adapted from the novel by James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice), there's also a very good HBO miniseries starring Kate Winslet and Guy Pearce.

Digital Rental Apple $5.99 (Miniseries is on Neon)

Mother (2009)

Bong Joon-Ho won an Oscar in 2020 for Parasite but he's been making troubling combinations of comedy, drama and social comment for many years. The mother in this film is played by Kim Hye-ja (and is only known as "Mother"), and she's on a relentless quest to free her intellectually disabled son from a murder rap, and the only way to do that is to find the real killer.

Digital Rental Arovision/Academy $4.99 and Madman Entertainment Blu-ray disc.

Freaky Friday (2003)

It's the 20th anniversary of the release of Disney's Freaky Friday - the second screen version of Mary Rodger's book - and despite the presence of Jodie Foster in the first one, this is the film that people have the most love for.

Lindsay Lohan plays an aspiring teen musician whose big break is thwarted when it clashes with the rehearsal for her widowed mom's wedding to a guy she doesn't approve of. After a huge argument in a Chinese restaurant, a magic fortune cookie prompts a body swap and some greater understanding across the generations.

Actors love doing this stuff - and it shows - but Jamie Lee Curtis' performance as the mother and the teenage daughter in her mom's body is all the more remarkable for the fact that she only got the job four days before filming when Annette Bening dropped out.

Streaming on Disney+

Tully (2018)

At the beginning of Tully, Charlize Theron as Marlo is heavily pregnant with her third child and just about at the end of her tether. The arrival of the bairn makes things even worse until the arrival of a "Night Nanny" on the recommendation of the family's richer friends. This one is Tully (Mackenzie Davis) and she is the Mary Poppins of night nannying. There is no situation so fraught that she can't turn around.

But there's also something a little off about Tully. She's too perfect. The resolution is one that I didn't see coming but is also kind of perfect in hindsight. Not given its due by most critics first time around, I reviewed it for At the Movies and you can listen back here.

Only a DVD rental in Aotearoa at the moment.

The Blind Side (2009)

There's all kinds of motherhood and The Blind Side is about adopted motherhood. Sandra Bullock - who was to win an Oscar for this role - plays Leigh Anne Tuohy, extremely wealthy courtesy of her husband's many fast food franchises. One evening she sees Michael Oher, a large Black youth, shuffling towards the school gym. It's the warmest place he can find to sleep. She takes him in out of Christian charity but then she - and he - discovers that he has a talent for American football and that her previously comfortable but unchallenged existence had found a purpose.

Back in 2009, this one blindsided me and I described it at the time as "a most satisfying evening at the pictures".

Streaming on Netflix

Postcards from the Edge (1990)

For a long while, if you were ever in a video shop (kids, ask your parents) and someone needed a recommendation you couldn't go wrong with Postcards from the Edge, a real crowd pleaser.

Based on the late Carrie Fisher's semi-autobiographical novel, Meryl Streep finally showed what a gifted comic actor she could be after a decade of carrying the dramatic world on her shoulders. She's matched by the wonderful Shirley Maclaine as her egotistical mother whose house she has to share in order to keep the insurance that allows her to work in Hollywood.

If you are after another crowd-pleasing movie with Meryl Streep that's about motherhood, you could try Mamma Mia! but that has made so much money, you probably already have.

Digital Rental Apple $5.99

Ben is Back (2018)

This is another film that took me by surprise when I reviewed it for At the Movies back in February 2019. Julia Roberts plays a mother whose son (Lucas Hedges) has gone wildly off the rails and who checks himself out of rehab so he can go home for Christmas. But there's plenty of trouble following in his wake and Roberts' character ends up on a wild and dangerous late night adventure trying to get the kid she loves - but despairs of - out of danger.

Digital Rental Apple $5.99

Julieta (2016)

Spanish genius Pedro Almodóvar has often found inspiration from mothers: All About My Mother, Volver, Parallel Mothers are the main ones but there are mothers sprinkled throughout his filmography. Based on three short stories by Alice Munro, Julieta is about a woman whose daughter has been out of her life for a dozen years but discovers there might be a chance at reconciliation.

On At the Movies in 2016, I said, "Julieta is mature Almodóvar at his finest. His visual flourishes are still domestically spectacular - nobody uses the colour red like he does. His attention to detail is fanatical but his occasional tendency towards indulgence is wonderfully muted here. At one time Meryl Streep was attached to this project but I cannot imagine a circumstance where her presence would have elevated this beyond its current magnificence."

On Beamafilm, a streaming service which may be available through your library. Also DVD rental if you're lucky.

Room (2015)

Room is a bit of an outlier in this list because it focuses on a mother actually doing some parenting - not the aftermath. Of course, there's a lot more to this film than that but my abiding memories of it are of Brie Larson's "Ma" dedicating herself to giving her five-year-old son Jack (Jacob Tremblay) the most normal childhood possible, despite them both being locked in a room by a demented kidnapper for Jack's entire life.

Eventually they escape and the second half of the film is about Jack's integration (and Ma's reintegration) into the real world. A terrific film: sensitive, thoughtful, caring. Like Ma.

Digital Rental $4.99-$5.99

Aliens (1986)

There are lots of essays on the internet that examine the Alien franchise through the lens of motherhood but the film that makes that subtext plain as day is James Cameron's Aliens. After all, what can you say about that titanic battle at the end except that it is one mother against another, desperate to preserve their children?

Earlier, Ripley has become a kind of surrogate mother to Newt (Carrie Henn), the only survivor of the colony our heroes have come to save. (In a deleted scene, we learn that Ripley had a daughter who died of old age while she was asleep on her voyage back from the Nostromo - a detail that will have informed Sigourney Weaver's performance as much as anything the audience actually saw.)

Streaming on Disney+