December 24–31, 1998

movies

Stepmom

		Watch your step: Sarandon and Roberts square off in Stepmom

Like being pounded by a wet, squishy mallet, watching Stepmom is a singularly damp and painful experience. An unabashed weepie which bypasses the heart and aims straight for the tear ducts, it's an unapologetic button pusher which has no greater aim than to leave its audience sniffling in the aisles. There is something depressing about Stepmom, but it's not anything to do with its maudlin plot. What's truly sad is just how low the movie sets its sights, how paltry its ambition. For all the starpower involved, the grand themes, the high-priced script doctors, there's not a moment here that hasn't been better done in a hundred better movies. It's like going to a banquet and finding the table stocked with Cheetos.

With her romantic sheen dulled to a slightly earthier glow, Julia Roberts plays Isabel, a high-priced fashion photographer who has just moved into the palatial Manhattan townhouse of Luke (Ed Harris), an attorney with two children from his previous marriage to Jackie (Susan Sarandon). Inevitably, in the manner of movies going back to Woman of the Year, Isabel finds that her cutthroat career isn't nearly as difficult as her domestic duties, and as an added bonus Jackie is always around to rub it in when she fails. Luke's progeny are uncooperative, of course, especially Anna (Jena Malone), the eldest, who's fond of yelling things like "You're not my real mother!" and "You're my problem!" Stepmom is not the kind of movie where you're ever in doubt how a character is feeling; everyone is conveniently forthright, dispensing emotions like Tic-Tacs. To make it worse, the movie consistently puts the most manipulative lines in the mouths of children, particularly Ben (Liam Aiken), a round-faced cutie tasked with turning to Jackie and saying, oh-so-innocently, "If you want me to hate [Isabel], I will."

As if the pain of divorce weren't fertile enough ground for a tearjerker, we find out without much delay that Jackie has cancer, and that her bitterness toward Luke's soon-to-be wife is in part motivated by her illness. For half the movie, this remains Jackie's secret, since the dinner she picks to inform her ex-husband is also the dinner he picks to tell her he's getting remarried. Ludicrously manipulative as that moment is, it's part and parcel of Stepmom's strategy, which never risks subtlety when the grindingly obvious will do. Every detail is calculated down to the last grain, and what's left out is as important as what's included. We never see Jackie with a single friend, because the movie wants her to seem isolated; although the camera accompanies Isabel on shoots (during one of which she allows Ben to wander off), we never see Luke at work, because he's not being accused of allowing his career to interfere with his parenting. (This despite the fact that Jackie says she divorced him because he was never home.) Assembled by a phalanx of screenwriters, including ubiquitous gun-for-hire Ronald Bass, Stepmom plays like a movie put together at a corporate board meeting: something for everyone, but everything to no one.

Perhaps the oddest part of Stepmom comes at the end, with the dedication to director Chris Columbus' late mother. The personal gesture seems out of place, even incorrect, after a movie like Stepmom, which treats emotion as a Pavlovian response. Movies like this are sold as "uplifting," as if they were testaments to the human spirit, but really they're just cheap ways of getting people to cry—either that or sending them out cursing the day the movies were invented. There's no room for a real reaction, no chance of coming up with your own way of responding to Stepmom; either submit, or decline.

—Sam Adams