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Stepmom
Emotional family drama from Harry Potter director Chris Columbus. Saintly divorcee Susan Sarandon struggles not to spar with her kids' new stepmom Julia Roberts, but everything changes when she is diagnosed with cancer
Columbus followed up body clock comedy Nine Months with a family drama, this time switching the emotional trigger from birth to death. Newly resident in the home of divorced lawyer Luke (Harris), fashion photographer Isabel (Roberts) tries to make friends with his precocious children but her advances aren't helped by their loyalty to biological mother Jackie (Sarandon), whose death by cancer is presented as a sort of New Age rite of passage. Performances are as competent as you'd expect from the big name cast, but these cash swamped characters are empty, self-obsessed and platitudinous. That Jackie's death should provoke nothing more in her kids than melancholy amazement is unlikely, and Columbus' direction is frequently bizarre. There's an odd scene involving the bestowment of some Pearl Jam tickets, and Jackie's announcement to her children that she's shortly to die is followed by a scene in which she and the gang shake a leg to 'River Deep Mountain High'. Cynics will say it's a manipulative, misguided movie that remains in the system for about as long as rotten apple pie, but those of a less exacting, more happily naive disposition will be charmed by its heart warming simplicity and easy to like starry cast. Verdict In lesser hands this could have been horribly mawkish. But with Harris and Sarandon on board, Stepmom is a superior weepy. |
