Otherhood (2019)

Corey Bulloch
Aug 3, 2019
3 min read

Updated: Oct 16, 2019

★★

Three mothers who are long-time friends and empty nesters decide to drive to New York City to reconnect with their adult sons.

Classification: 15

Creating comedy from its ensemble and exploring the realties of the more bitter truths of sons estranged from their mothers, Otherhood is unable to establish a real emotional resonance with its characters or subject matter. While director Cindy Chupack uses the film as a platform for her actresses to cut loose, it seems that the potential of the material was an afterthought as the script follows a very hollow, predictable structure that doesn't allow the film to establish itself above forgettable mediocrity. The performances are the highlight especially from Angela Bassett and Felicity Huffman, displaying the potential of the project as their attempts to reconnect with their sons led to opportunities end in ill fated arguments and revelations.

Chupack easily establishes empathy and understanding for the abandoned mothers, the issue with Otherhood isn't the generational differences audiences may have with the subject matter but the overall tone of the execution. The comedy of Otherhood is a mixed bag, using the awkward encounters the characters have with their sons to extract story beats and relatability from the audiences own personal experiences. Mothers can be overbearing, Mothers can be embarrassing, Mother interfere; the screenplay has each character emodiy a stereotype about mothering and builds their personality around that rather than anything intimate or original. These are women who have been defined by their relationships with their husbands and their sons and while these characters become aware of it over the course of the film, the filmmakers make no real attempt to have them develop beyond this. Bassett's character states she doesn't know who she is without her son and needs to find herself but the realisation comes too late as Otherhood spends too much time with the mothers obsessing over their sons rather than their own personal growth. Chupack wants to handle both of these storylines at once but doesn't deliver the result she intended.

Otherhood is a film that derives enjoyment just from the fact that the actresses are having fun together, the friendly chemistry between Bassett, Arquette, and Huffman doesn't give the impression of a decades long female friendship but still is enjoyable. They play off each other well, giving life to their clichéd character traits but the screenplay never lets them thrive beyond the tired plot points. The actors who play their sons are just as worn out with their character traits being just as predictable making it easier to empathise with their mother characters being mistreated but harder to get invested in the mission to reconnect with their offspring. Chupack direction of the story unfortunately takes on a "Hollywood" sheen as the sets, locations and attitudes of the characters take on a distance from reality. All the characters have great jobs, expensive homes, go to the fanciest locations, even the character supposed to be down on his luck has a nice lifestyle; the issue isn't that affluence is on display but that this fanciness takes away from the film's realism. There isn't a sense of relatable reality that can be grasped from Otherhood, it can at times just feel like a fantasy of what life in New York City is like.

The most interesting elements of Otherhood are not put to their fullest potential as the personal realisations the characters come to happen briefly in the third act after long meandering comedy sequences throughout the film. The grand emotional catharsis Chupack wants her characters to go through doesn't feel earned or widely developed. The overall experience of the film is a series of predictable plot points and jokes which the filmmakers want you to feel are justified because it deals with the alienation of parents and their children. The comedy isn't particularly memorable or humourous, and only a few scenes really have an emotional core to connect with its audience, while the rest leaves you unengaged and uninterested with its arduous story.

Director: #CindyChupack

Cast: #AngelaBassett, #PatriciaArquette, #FelicityHuffman, #JakeHoffman, #JakeLacy, #SinquaWalls, #HeidiGardner