Review: Mothers and Daughters

Christina Ricci in Mothers and Daughters

Mothers and Daughters is a series of slightly interwoven tales about mothers and daughters that came out in 2016 just in time for Mother’s Day. It has an absolutely fabulous cast.

I’ll start with the cast: Christina Ricci, Courteney Cox, Sharon Stone, Eva Amurri Martino, Susan Sarandon, Mira Sorvino, Selma Blair, Alexandra Daniels, Paul Wesley, Christopher Backus, Dave Baez and more.

Impressive cast, right? They did their parts and gave their best toward making it work. But it didn’t work.

Every character is a white, wealthy New Yorker. I don’t hold that against them, just setting the scene.

Selma Blair in Mothers and Daughters

Selma Blair as Rigby the photographer leads us into the tale. Her relationship with her mother is bad because her mother has dementia and Rigby can’t handle it. Then she gets pregnant. What’s a single girl who travels to photograph rock bands gonna do?

Rebecca (Ricci) discovers her sister and brother-in-law are her parents when her mother (actually her grandmother) dies. There’s a lot of anger and explaining to do.

Nina (Stone) has an adopted daughter Layla (Daniels). Mom is in the fashion industry. Daughter wants to be but pretends to squander her education as a waitress while secretly creating fashion. They live in the same building with Georgina (Sorvino), a fashion designer herself. Through the magic of movie making, Georgina turns out to be Layla’s birth mother.

Finally there’s Gayle (Martino) who is angry with her motherĀ (Sarandon) because she feels less than perfect herself and needs to blame someone. She wants money to help her husband start a bakery. After two years of not speaking to her mother, she goes to her mom to get the money.

Maybe their stories intertwine because Rigby photographs them all for a book about mothers and daughters? Maybe they all live in the same building? The connections between their stories is slender.

The movie was too sweet, too Hallmark cardesque, there are too many mothers and daughters who figure out how to love each other with perfection. There was no nuance. One story, one well-developed mother and daughter, would have been more interesting.

Mothers and Daughters was directed by Paul Duddridge and Nigel Levy. If you want to feel good about love between mothers and daughters, this movie will satisfy you. Don’t worry. Be happy.

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