The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015. Remaining movies: 167 Days to go: 118
Movie #271: Stepmom
My son was born ten days late. They brought me in first thing in the morning to induce labor and twelve hours later he still hadn’t dropped an inch, so I ended up with a c-section. To this day, he still would much rather stay in his comfort zone than venture out of it, and you basically have to prod him along to get him to do anything. My daughter, on the other hand, was a scheduled c-section before my due date. The day before admittance, I had an amniocentesis to ensure her lungs were strong and was having so many contractions afterward they were going to send me up to delivery right then. This threw me into a panic, because all my plans had been made for the next day. Luckily, my doctor wasn’t available and since it wasn’t urgent they sent me home. The next day, as I was being prepped for surgery, I went into labor. She likes to throw wrenches into all my plans, that one. Stepmom came out before I had kids, but it gave me the idea that a child’s delivery was an indication of their personality, and I bought into it because of my own delivery. (I was a month late, because back in the day they allowed that sort of thing, and on the day my mom was to be induced, her water broke. I basically will put everything off as long as I possibly can, and then I’m like, “FINE.”) I actually ask about all my friends’ deliveries, and tell those stories all the time, for that same reason. All because of Stepmom.
I think Stepmom gets kind of a bad rap. It’s a horrible title for the film, which I remember the entire cast acknowledging in some HBO First Look or something back in the day, but there’s not really an immediately evident better one. That doesn’t mean the movie doesn’t have its merits. On the contrary, it has many, and I almost never fail to stop and watch if I happen to catch it on TV. (That’s not always an indication of a great film, but in this case I do like Stepmom quite a bit.)
The film is about the rivalry between Jackie (Susan Sarandon) and Isabel (Julia Roberts) — Isabelle being the new woman in Jackie’s ex-husband’s (Luke, played by Ed Harris) life. Jackie is basically SuperMom to her and Luke’s two kids, Anna (Jena Malone) and Ben (Liam Aiken), whereas Isabel is still trying to figure them out (and meeting a lot of resistance along the way). It may be emotionally manipulative in places, but what I really love is how, in truth, neither woman has all the answers, but neither one of them is wrong, either. They lash out at each other, which is often mean and unwarranted, but you can see that it originates from pain and fear and frustration. And it turns out to be just heartbreaking. When Ben says to Jackie, of Isabel, “If you want me to hate her, I will,” her face plummets with the realization of what she’s doing to her kids by undermining Isabel and how she’s teaching them to hold negativity in their hearts, and it kills her more than having them like Isabel ever would.
Essentially, that’s what it’s all about. Jackie is still bitter that her husband left her, that her marriage failed, and that he’s found some young, beautiful, successful someone new while she remains the responsible homemaker, and she’s terrified of losing her kids to this interloper as well. Meanwhile, Isabel is flustered by the abrupt changes in her life that sharing it with two kids eventually brings, but more than that she feels perpetually inadequate compared with Jackie. So even though she really grows to love the children and to want to spend time with them, she believes she always suffers by comparison to their mom. And Jena Malone (who is really great here, by the way, long before she knocked all our socks off in Catching Fire), plays Anna with such a true and sincere combination of insecurity and spitefulness and loyalty. She loves her mom, of course, and she feels a sense of solidarity and obligation to her to stand on her side and to disparage everything to do with Isabel on principle. Her coming around on that point is so gradual and so tentative and so authentic, it really drives home how difficult these changes are for everyone.
And the thing is, I’ve been on both the giving and receiving end of a lot of these feelings and issues, so I can say with certainty how true to life the underlying emotions of the film are. Sure, these people are all inordinately genteel compared with how two sides of a broken family more likely are. (Jackie are Luke, for example, despite having some contentious arguments at times, are still close friends, which is not impossible but is insanely hard.) But I think they’re like that in order to best convey how possible it can be to act in the best interests of your kids (difficult, but possible), and how that should be the goal. I’ve actually kept that in mind all through my divorce and my second marriage. It’s not something I’ve always achieved, but it has always been what I’ve striven for.
The two resolve their differences by the film’s end, as movie rivals often do, though it’s maybe made easier by the state of Jackie’s health, which is kind of cheating. Still, it’s a really nice moment. And the conversation they have about someday in the future, at Anna’s eventual wedding, is one that consistently brings me to tears and one that I’ve thought about often with regard to my own dear stepdaughter and my hope that one day she’ll come to realize, as Jackie says, that “they don’t have to choose. They can have us both.”
It can be painful, but the alternative is worse.
Viable Option 