THE AISLE SEAT - "STEPMOM"
by Mike McGranaghan
At times, I found my attention wandering during Stepmom. I started thinking about where to go for dinner, or whether I would stop at Wal-Mart on the way home, or what I was going to do that evening. I looked at my watch a lot to see what time it was. It's not that this is a bad movie, it's just that the plot is a by-the-numbers tearjerker that contains not a single surprise. Theoretically, you could take a nap during the movie, wake up, and still know exactly where you were in the plot.
Susan Sarandon stars as Jackie, a divorced mother of two. Her ex-husband Luke (Ed Harris) lives with a much younger woman named Isabel (Julia Roberts). Jackie neither likes nor trusts Isabel, and those feelings pass down to her kids, Anna (Jena Malone) and Ben (Liam Aiken). At one point, Ben even says to his mother, "If you want me to hate her, I will." There is a lot of friction among the characters. Although Isabel tries to be a friend to the children, they resent her presence in their father's home. Jackie, meanwhile, doesn't think Isabel is responsible enough to care for her kids.
And so we get a series of manufactured crises designed to alternately pull the women apart and then bring them together. Ben gets lost in the park while under Isabel's care; later he falls from a jungle gym at the playground and injures himself. Anna throws one juvenile snit-fit after another, gets her heart broken by a boy at school, and catches her father having sex with Isabel in the shower. Each of these little dramas sets off a feud between the adults, wherein they all assert that they just want what's best for the children. We know, of course, that the children are being put in the middle of the adults' jealousies and insecurities.
And then tragedy strikes. I was under the impression that the plot of Stepmom was common knowledge, but in speaking to others who have seen the film, I find that most of them are surprised by the plot twist that occurs part-way through. If you don't want to know what it is, skip to the next paragraph now. We all know that any kind of sentimental tearjerker needs some sort of catastrophe, and in Stepmom, we learn that Jackie is slowly dying of cancer. As she prepares to tell Luke about her impending death, he (in a really contrived coincidence) announces that he's going to marry Isabel. Realizing that the younger woman is going to be the kids' only mother figure soon, Jackie sets out to mend fences and teach Isabel how to be a good parent, while trying to get her kids to accept their future stepmother.
Stepmom was directed by Chris Columbus (Nine Months, Mrs. Doubtfire), a filmmaker who never met a cliche he didn't embrace. The script (which is credited to five writers) is strictly a TV-style "disease of the week" movie in which artificial events cause drama until Something Major forces everyone to get along. As a sign of its desperation, Stepmom even employs that most cloying of devices: an elaborately choreographed lip-sync routine. I don't trust movies that have these things. Real people don't solve their problems by prancing around to an oldie. The lip-sync routine is used by screenwriters who don't know what to do with their characters.
As treacly as it is, Stepmom is made tolerable by the actors. It's hard to go too far wrong with Julia Roberts, Ed Harris and Susan Sarandon. I'm not sure why any of them would want to work on such a familiar, pedestrian story, but they do the best they can with what they have. And once in a while, they even have enough to scrape together a good scene. I particularly liked the one in which Isabel counsels Anna on how to get revenge on the boy who broke her heart. There's some surprising energy there (as well as an amusing reference to the movie Clerks). The majority of the picture just kind of plods along, though; if they couldn't devise a more original plot, at least they had the good sense to cast the movie perfectly.
Stepmom ends with the requisite "hopeful" ending designed to choke you up with bittersweet tears. It didn't work on me, though. I don't have any particular dislike for tearjerkers. In fact, I fully admit that by the end of One True Thing (another recent film dealing with parent/child relationships in the midst of tragedy), I was bawling like a baby. That film earned its tears through fully developed characters and a story that had deep emotional truths. Stepmom takes the easy road, pulling out all the usual sentimental tricks in leiu of honesty. Usually after seeing a movie, it sticks in my mind for a while, whether it was good or bad. After this movie, I walked out of the theater and it was gone.
(
out of four)
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