Disney
There’s no doubting Roger Ebert’s standing as one of the great critics but he certainly had some perplexing takes in his time. One example was when Ebert gave a perfect score to an extremely weird fantasy horror or when he gave a full four stars to a mediocre Samuel L. Jackson thriller. With 1988’s “The Good Mother,” however, he was right on the money when he described the movie as having been “made with the best of intentions and the worst of screenplays.”
“The Good Mother” is an adaptation of Sue Miller’s novel of the same name — a book that seems to have been well-received. A New York Times review surmised that “this powerful novel proves as subtle as it is dramatic, as durable — in its emotional afterlife — as it is instantly readable.” The film adaptation, however, made Roger Ebert write: “‘The Good Mother’ is one of the most confused and conflicted serious movies in a long time.”
This was the 1988 Diane Keaton and Liam Neeson flop that caused “Star Trek V” to be delayed. But it did a lot more than that. The odd little drama was directed by none other than Leonard Nimoy himself, who apparently wanted to subvert societal views on civil courts and sexual liberation, but ended up making a movie wherein Liam Neeson exposes himself to a little kid and he’s somehow not the bad guy. Thankfully, Ebert saw “The Good Mother” for what it was. He gave the film just a single star and took Nimoy to task for essentially making a movie without having a single clue as to what it was actually about.
Liam Neeson plays the most clueless man in history in The Good Mother
Disney
“The Good Mother” stars Diane Keaton as piano teacher Anna Dunlop, who having recently divorced her husband, Brian (James Naughton), works part-time to support her and her six-year-old daughter, Molly (Asia Viera). Soon, Leo Cutter (Liam Neeson), a seemingly clueless bohemian Irish sculptor, charms the divorcee, which sounds like the basis for a rom-com. But this ain’t “When Harry Met Sally” and Leo ain’t Harry Burns — unless there’s a cut scene from that movie in which Billy Crystal’s leading man allows the six-year-old daughter of Meg Ryan’s Sally Albright to touch his privates.
Yes, long before the age of the old man Liam Neeson oeuvre, the Irish star played a man with a very particular set of skills — which is to say he had the skill of being woefully unaware that allowing a small child to touch his nether regions in the bathroom probably isn’t the best idea. Apparently, he does so in order to bolster Anna’s sex-positive philosophy on child-rearing, but it remains unclear what exactly happened and the film makes no attempt to clear it up.
Soon, Brian — apparently the only character with any sort of sense — sues for custody of Molly and wins. But he’s presented as some sort of monster for doing so. All of which is supposed to represent a challenge to our collective view on children’s exposure to sexuality and a criticism of courts’ ability to dictate the personal lives of citizens. Really, Brian taking Molly just seems like the best outcome to this misguided little film. Or, to use Ebert’s phrasing, a film that “feels great passion about its subject matter but has no idea what it wants to say or how to say it.”
Roger Ebert was more confused than upset by The Good Mother
Disney
Roger Ebert hated a lot of films, including an Oscar-winning war movie that caused him to walk out. Then, there was Clint Eastwood’s forgotten gangster movie, which Ebert also hated and described as a “travesty.” With “The Good Mother” he seemed more perplexed than anything else. In his one-star review, Ebert seemed as confused as the filmmakers themselves in trying to figure out what the film was trying to say. Evidently, Leonard Nimoy’s drama prompted him to “wonder if anybody actually thought this story through and decided, for sure, what it was about.”
The whole thing is seemingly designed to paint Diane Keaton and Liam Neeson’s characters as victims of a court system hostile to progressive ideas but the film is literally about a strange man who enters a woman’s house and does some dodgy stuff with her young daughter, regardless of the specifics of the scene in question. Speaking of which, as Ebert notes, this crucial bathroom scene isn’t actually in the movie. “When a little girl and her mother’s boyfriend are involved in the crucial event of the movie, the camera is elsewhere,” he writes, while pointing out how the movie has time for all sorts of superfluous nonsense but not the critical moment of the story.
Aside from that, Ebert thought the courtroom scenes had “all the elements of an Idiot Plot,” and that the one scene that did work was compromised. It involves Anna Dunlop visiting her grandparents (Ralph Bellamy and Teresa Wright) to ask for money to hire a lawyer. “This scene is powerfully acted by Wright and Bellamy,” writes Ebert, “and succeeds, and is moving, and is so convincing that it shows up the contrivance and manipulation of the rest of the film.”
