So focuses on Eliza's need to look out for number one that [the film] obscures the reasons people become parents, winding up with a movie light on love and heavy on narcissism.
Motherhood (2009)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:31
Fresh:8
Rotten:23
Average Rating:4/10
Consensus: Despite Uma Thurman's comic skills, Motherhood's contrived set-ups and cliched jokes keep this comedy from delivering laughs -- or insights into modern parenting.
Genre: Comedies
Synopsis: Shot entirely on location in New York’s West Village, MOTHERHOOD is a comedy distilling the dilemmas of the maternal state into the trials and tribulations of one pivotal day. MOTHERHOOD forms a... Shot entirely on location in New York’s West Village, MOTHERHOOD is a comedy distilling the dilemmas of the maternal state into the trials and tribulations of one pivotal day. MOTHERHOOD forms a genre of one – no other movie has dedicated itself in quite this way to probing exactly what it takes to be a mother, with both humor and authenticity. MOTHERHOOD, a funny and poignant look at the daily challenges mothers everywhere face, is a hymn to the trials and joys of raising children and the necessity of not losing yourself in the process. --© Freestyle [More]
Starring: Uma Thurman, Anthony Edwards, Minnie Driver, Samantha Bee
Starring: Uma Thurman, Anthony Edwards, Minnie Driver, Samantha Bee
Director: Katherine Dieckmann
Director: Katherine Dieckmann
Screenwriter: Katherine Dieckmann
Studio: Freestyle Releasing
Reviews for Motherhood
The film treats the responsibilities of parenthood like another film would treat cancer, as a dream-killing condition to be endured until it passes or kills you. As a contraceptive device, that works brilliantly.
Revealing the contradictions of this postfeminist age, Motherhood is good enough to recall Up the Sandbox, the elegant and eccentric 1972 response to feminism, race, class and media...
[Thurman is] quite funny, but her performance is at once winning and overstated.
A portrait of parenthood that’s apt to turn one into an ardent advocate of contraception, Motherhood portrays such shrill, mopey and all-around unpleasant adults that it’s hard to believe any of them found procreative partners.
Motherhood is a deceptive film that seems to be one thing when it starts %u2013 and then turns a corner and becomes something else, something deeper and more perceptive.
Dieckmann nails the look of a certain niche of urban neo-middle-class living, but the film's hyper-earnest tone and reliance on "day-from-hell" New York clichés overwhelm those details.
Director Katherine Dieckmann, who demonstrated some natural comic rhythms and efficiency with actors in Diggers, is here unable to surmount the sitcom dreariness of her first original screenplay, apparently a "write-what-you-know" misjudgment.
What Eliza writes, like Motherhood itself, feels like a stale collection of harried-parent material that the bland comedy duo The Mommies milked dry more than a decade ago.
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