Bad Moms. Fuck Yes.
It started out and I was a little like, ‘Please don’t ask me to believe that Mila Kunis with her insane eyelashes, her insane everything, is just this average mom with the 20-year-old start-up coffee company boss from central casting and a douchy husband who doesn’t notice how hot she is.’ Please don’t ask me to believe that.
Don’t ask me to believe that Christina Applegate, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Annie Mumolo playing the antagonistic PTA nazi moms from hell are really wearing those strange blazers that came off the rack of Bloomingdale’s circa 1994.
Because that’s just confusing me. And worrying me.
I’m starting to worry maybe you two MEN who wrote and directed this movie about ME, a mom in her 30s who alternates between feeling like a goddamn fucking superhero with Jedi mindtrick magic powers and a certifiable crazy lady who definitely screams alone in her car sometimes and punches piles of stuffed animals when no one is looking, maybe you two dudes don’t quite GET IT.
But then about 20 minutes in you did something that really got my attention. Something that told me you DO get it. You got the three Bad Moms (Mila K, Kristen Bell, and Kathryn Hahn who may be the funniest woman currently alive today) wasted and took them grocery shopping (no, that in and of itself isn’t the thing).
In what could only feel to me like a hilarious, sideways homage to the Charlie’s Angels reboot with Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, and Lucy Liu, you sent them down the aisles in slow motion to the pop song “I Love It,” guzzling vodka and shoving fruit loops and donuts into their mouths like a pack of carb-starved fucking maniacs.
Excellent, yes. I was starting to get excited about where this mom-fantasy was going. But then you had a critical decision to make. The action suddenly freezes when our Bad Moms are confronted with a BABY in his stroller, staring up at them like ‘WHAT the fuck are you?’ Does this baby kill their buzz, start crying? Does his mother admonish them for being so intensely out of control? No, we reverse cut to the baby’s POV staring up at these three drunk chicks who instantly start cooing over him! They’re like, ‘Awww look at you, you are the cutest sweetest baby ever!’
And the partying continues. This moment is, to me, what the whole movie is about. And it’s why the movie works. It is a moment of truth, in the sense that it is THE truth. That no matter what we are doing or not doing, whether we are working or traveling or fucking or complaining or freaking out or getting wasted or out at the movies with 14 other moms (as I was last night when I saw this), we are never not moms. We are never not madly in love with our kids, with all kids on this earth.
This movie is about exactly this fact. The take-away is that the relentlessness of our love is both the challenge but also the incredible blessing of motherhood. It is what inspires us daily and makes our hearts beat even as it threatens at times to actually beat US. Once entered into, we are confined to this unbreakable contract that forces us to live a paradoxical dichotomy. Me AND us, always. Forever.
Toward the peak of the third act, the film has another such choice to make. Mila’s kids have gone to stay with their dad (who’s moved out because: see above, he did not appreciate her and it’s all good because, spoiler alert: hot widower Jay Hernandez is there to be her hot new boyfriend). She is feeling like a fuck-up, yet again but for new reasons now (instead of managing to be darn close to ‘perfect’ she’s given ‘perfect’ the finger and it appears to be backfiring).
The door closes on her kids, dog, and ex all leaving and what does she do? Does she call Jay Hernandez? Does she pour herself a glass of wine? Does she go to bed? No. She goes and sits in her kids rooms for a few minutes and then slinks down to the hallway floor, missing them and worried she’s let them down.
Could I feel the script notes on this section: ‘we need to make sure she’s still likeable even when she’s doing all this ‘bad’ stuff and losing her kids’ trust?’ Yes. BUT, I also saw through the melodrama to what was being gotten at: when the kids are gone, we miss the shit out of them and when they are with us, sometimes, we want to drive to Mexico alone and never look back. Here again the movie puts us right in the middle of that contradiction and I so appreciated feeling understood in that way.
Last thing I’ll point to that really won my heart. The film ends, it’s an absurd case of wish-fulfillment that I’m not going to argue with because that’s why we go to a movie like this, right? And I was waiting for ‘what’s the funny credits sequence thing they’re going to do?’ Because you know they have to do something.
Is it going to be like the Grumpy Old Men credits which gave us outtakes of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau riffing on various euphemisms for sex? (‘Skin boat to tuna town’ is the one seared in my memory for life. Ugh). Are we going to see Kathryn Hahn outdoing herself somehow (not sure how that would be possible)?
NO! These guys give us all the lead actresses, docustyle, with their real-life MOMS!! Talking about motherhood. And it’s funny and touching as hell, because guess what? The moms all think their daughters are the best moms ever. And the daughters all get teary-eyed when their mothers say that. Feeling seen and appreciated for all their complicated, flawed, perfect imperfection.
Because that’s the whole fucking thing, people. That unbreakable, unusual, unfathomable love, underscored so beautifully by Mila’s line to her daughter when she tells her she and the dad are getting divorced: you’ll get through this, she tells her. “How do you know?” asks the daughter. “Because no one knows you better than I do. No one knows what you’re made of like I do.”
