Title: The Good Mother
Describe This Movie In One Cannonball Run Quote:
VICTOR: And those priests, they weren’t fathers.
J.J. MCCLURE: They were …
VICTOR: Mothers!
Brief Plot Synopsis: Wire hangers are the least of this mommy’s problems.
Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: 1 Underwood Five out of 5.
Tagline: N/A
Better Tagline: “Mother, Drugs & Grief“
Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: Marissa (Hilary Swank) lost her husband a short time ago, but can at least take solace that her two sons, junkie Michael (co-writer Madison Harrison) and cop Toby (Jack Reynor), are mostly alive. Hold that thought, because when Michael is murdered, Marissa finds herself teaming up with his (surprise!) pregnant girlfriend Paige (Olivia Cooke) to get to the bottom of his death.
“Critical” Analysis: Gonna be a long autumn, everybody.
The ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strike have already pushed several late 2023 releases into the next year, leaving movies that either don’t need a lot of advance publicity (no press screenings for Equalizer 3) or don’t want it. Which brings us to The Good Mother, which no amount of pre-release junketing would make more watchable.
Perhaps that’s why it’s set in 2016, to allow for a little historical leeway. For example, Marissa still works for a newspaper (the Albany chapter of the Times Union) and still makes a (diminishing) living doing so. She’s also valued enough as a writer that neither her alcoholism nor the extended period of grieving for her husband — who died an unspecified amount of time earlier — is enough to get her canned.
Then again, who are we kidding? Drinking was/is almost never enough to get a decent reporter fired.
Directed by Miles Joris-Peyrafitte (As Your Are, Dreamland), co-writing with frequent collaborator Harrison, The Good Mother almost feels like an extended episode of a television procedural: a predictable whodunit that belatedly throws some stuff at the wall about coping with loss, but lacks saying much of anything shocking or suspenseful.
Remind me; which one is the “good” mother, exactly? Marissa is still wallowing in widowhood and is largely distant from her kids when Michael gets killed, while Paige is doing her best to pick up the pieces of his death while also trying to get to the bottom of his murder. Cooke isn’t given a lot to do with the role, but her relative effervescence offers a nice contrast to whatever it is going on with Swank.
As gratifying as it would be to say The Good Mother was shot in an original and compelling way, like Joris-Peyrafitte and Harrison’s Dreamland, that’s not the case here. His framing and orchestral cues hint at a horror approach, but they’re undercut by the painstakingly deliberate narrative.
Swank continues her Alaska Daily trend of playing disillusioned newspaper people. And since The Good Mother takes place seven years ago, it’s almost plausible to think she’s playing the same character as long as you don’t pay any attention to the TV character’s backstory.
She does walk through this movie in almost more of a daze than her situation warrants. Swank’s career is hard to put your finger on. She’s a two-time Oscar winner (Boys Don’t Cry, Million Dollar Baby) that’s also absolutely sleepwalked through stuff like The Black Dahlia while giving great/fun performances in The Homesman and The Hunt. To paraphrase Clark Kellogg in The Freshman, there’s a certain freedom in collecting two Academy Awards.
The resolution to The Good Mother is unsatisfying, but that’s probably the point Joris-Peyrafitte and Harrison are trying to make. If crafting an ambivalent and aggravating story that can’t decide what it wants to be counts, that is.
The Good Mother is in theaters today.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
