It’s an admirable enough goal: to make a comedy that’s fearlessly honest about motherhood. But something went wrong in the transformation of writer-director Katherine Dieckmann’s work from whinging diary entry to cinematic art.
Uma Thurman, who now lays claim to an unbroken row of stinkers wafting back to 2006’s My Super Ex-Girlfriend, plays Eliza, a middle-class Manhattan mum, who’s trying to keep hold of her identity in a hurricane of playdates, lunchboxes and birthday parties.
There are a few truths here, fleetingly captured, but mostly this is a portrait of daily drudgery that’s boring, sure, but too privileged to be pitiable. Surely the working mothers who might identify with this would rather spend their precious Saturday night watching something – anything – a bit more entertaining?
Motherhood is neither insight nor escapism. It’s a yummy-mummy newspaper column splurged onto celluloid, like baby sick on your best cashmere sweater.
