# Stepmom (1998)

### reviewed by
Nicole Lesley

    Stepmom

    Director: Chris Columbus.

Starring: Susan Sarandon, Julia Roberts, Ed Harris, two annoying children.

Yes, I'll admit it. I did go to see Stepmom: partly because of its two leading actors and partly because someone asked me. No, mostly because someone asked me. And, in spite of it all, I'll still talk to that person.

Stepmom is exactly what you would expect: an over-wrought, weepy film. The basic premise is that Jackie (Susan Sarandon) and Luke (Ed Harris), who have two children, are divorced. Luke has taken up with Isabel (Julia Roberts), who is having trouble coping with being a parent, even if only part-time. Jackie is having trouble coping with the fact that her ex-husband has fallen in love again, and that she may be being replaced in the lives of her children. Oh yeah, and Jackie is having trouble coping with dying of cancer.

Clearly we have enough going on here to give the tear ducts a good work-out. I saw the movie in a packed movie theatre and people were crying their eyes out; the woman next to me was crying and sniffing and blowing her nose all throughout the picture. As it sets out to be a weepy, Stepmom achieves one of its goals. Since telephone commercials can make people cry, we need some other criteria by which to judge this movie.

First, the performances. All the adults in Stepmom give very good performances. All are experienced actors with a track record of playing good to great roles. All enunciate clearly, cry at the right moments, look frazzled when expected. No, there is nothing wrong with the adult performances. The daughter, Anna (Jena Malone), also does a fine job with a strange role. I'm not sure if she was meant to be a spoilt brat or just someone coming to terms with it all. Currently, I'm voting for the spoilt brat but the script didn't really make it clear. The son, Ben (Liam Aiken), however, was not at all fine. Given his young age and the material with which he was working, I'm confident that none of it was his fault. I think we can lay the blame squarely at the feet of the director, Chris Columbus. This child was vomit-inducingly cute, unfailingly, consistently, throughout the movie: not one bad mood, not one sour expression, not one iota of a resemblance to a normal child.

While we're dealing with things that aren't at all fine, let's consider the script. Stepmom covers what I consider to be potentially interesting film-making topics. Split families with changing dynamics are common in our society: a movie examining these roles could be very illuminating. Also, here's a movie with two strong female roles, and two quite good female actors cast in those roles. Unfortunately, Stepmom feels the need to manipulate rather than investigate, underline rather than understate, overplay rather than imply.

Even given this, Stepmom is confusing. Clearly, we are meant to believe that Jackie is a great mother but until the very end, we never see that. Instead we see a manipulative, nasty woman without a generous bone in her body. Throughout the film, we see Isabel trying so hard in her new role of stepmom, often being the voice of reason, yet during the meeting of the two women in the bar, (and there appears to be only one bar), they do a body switch and Jackie is the reasonable one and Isabel the selfish one. Very strange.

On top of this, although the movie itself is quite long, and every scene overplayed, Stepmom takes place in a relatively short space of time: the beginning of Autumn (in the US) to Christmas. The metamorphosis of these characters would have been much more believable over a longer space of time: the only reason I can see for not doing this was that making Ben age a year or two would have been tricky. On the time-compression topic, no-one can make a quilt that quickly, especially not if they're doing other things at the same time, like, say, chemotherapy. Just little things like that, had they been correctly handled, would have made the movie more enjoyable.

Now it sounds like I hated this movie. That's not quite the case. I just felt so much of it could have been done much better. Had that happened, this movie would have moved up a rating notch. Instead of really dealing with the issues involved, the heart-strings were tugged, the violins were strained and the emotions exaggerated. Of course, you'll cry and you might even laugh at Ben's antics, but it feels empty, so that when you leave the theatre you start thinking of all the worthwhile things you could have done with the price of admission. If you feel the need for a good cry, what till it comes out on video.

    Rating: CP

Nikki Lesley 1998

Ratings System

    HD: High Distinction
     D: Distinction
    CR: Credit
     P: Pass
    CP: Conceded Pass
     F: Failreview page: http://www.cs.usyd.edu.au/~nikki/m_r/Intro.html

The review above was posted to the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due to ASCII to HTML conversion.

Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews