Motherhood is featured in memorable ways in film this past season, illuminating several universal truths we mama types need to hear:
1. Even hardened drug dealers miss their mothers when they die.
The words "I miss her every day," spoken by "Moonlight" actor Mahershala Ali, resound particularly melodious for the mother of young adult children whose starring role is beginning to feel like yesterday's story. It is helpful for a mother in transition to consider she eventually will be mourned by the people whose singular work now is to override her.
2. Mothers of adult children still occasionally get the last word.
I can't ever see myself slapping one of my adult children across the face to make a point like diehard matriarch Viola Davis in one of the final scenes of "Fences." It's nonetheless good to see a mother hold sway over her grown son on the big screen, not to mention a strapping, Marine-corporal son in full dress blues.
3. Past, present, and future often blur in a mother's mind.
That my 28-year-old can be reduced to age 6 in my mind's eye apparently is not specific to me, as is made clear in "Arrival." Amy Adams plays the mother of a now-she's-dead, now-she's-alive, sometimes infant, sometimes school-aged child in this sci-fi film that intentionally warps our understanding of life as a chronological, birth-to-adulthood-to-death experience.
4. A mother will not let anyone, not even the father, stand in the way of loving her child.
"Manchester By the Sea" constitutes a "Sophie's Choice" of a different order, as a grieving Michelle Williams cannot help but choose the memory of her children over her husband. Remembering this brings solidarity when my eldest phones from far away. I will always stop what I'm doing, including having dinner with his father, when I see Chris' number on my cell. This rarely works in reverse.
5. Mothers would have a much easier go of it if they had a nanny, a chef, a chauffeur and a personal secretary.
I've let my family know this a few hundred times. To watch widowed Mrs. JFK, portrayed by Natalie Portman in "Jackie," gracefully navigate overwhelming grief while a nanny tends her two small children and a handmaiden dresses her, is to feel validated, if not slightly woozy.
6. Whether adoptive or biological, mother is mother is mother.
"Lion" proves this as Dev Patel phones home to connect with his adoptive mother at a pivotal point with his biological mom. Both women are primary in Patel's search for himself, a tangled young-adult journey that is particularly lovely to watch when one's child is not the one doing the untangling. I also appreciated, during one of the movie's tenderest scenes, director Garth Davis allowing Nicole Kidman's weepy unmade-up, 48-year-old face to take up the whole screen as she tells her adopted son how much she wanted him. Davis manages to keep our attention on the etchings of mother love in Kidman's visage, not the number of wrinkles.
None of these Academy-Award-nominated films is about motherhood per-say, which is good since only mothers would go to see them. This point of fact begs one notable exception: "20th Century Women." In this film, single mother Annette Bening illuminates the ultimate agony of motherhood, trying to usher her son over the threshold into adulthood while at the same time clinging to her own shifting identity.
Surely I am not as clumsy as Bening's Dorothea. I am neither a public chain-smoker nor hopelessly oblivious to the cues my children send me. Still, watching a grasping-for purpose Bening hovering over her soon-to-be-gone son, looking every bit like she wants to climb into his brain to make sure he's learned everything she needs to teach, feels a tad familiar. And not just to me but to my 19-year-old son, elbowing me in the ribs in the theater.
Later, he reassures me: "You're a little like her, Mom, but not a lot."
Thank God for that. And yet still to come is the one line in the film that has everybody in the theater, including the aforementioned 19-year-old, snickering:
A panicked Bening is pressuring one of Bening's son's friends to do something to help her son become a man. The friend, played by Elle Fanning, turns the tables, as, between puffs on a cigarette, she says the same thing to Bening.
"It's always about the mother," she insists.
There it is.
Immortalized in film forever.
