Mother's Day (2016)

Garry Marshall's final outing as a director assembles a large cast in Atlanta and lets them orbit the gravitational pull of a greeting-card holiday. Three generations, several divorces, one widower, an adoption reunion, and a great deal of scheduling. The ensemble is studiously multi-ethnic: a white woman married to an Indian man, Black and Latina performers in the supporting ranks, an interracial marriage treated as unremarkable. Whether any of this constitutes a thesis is doubtful. It reads as a studio casting spreadsheet rendered in flesh.

Then there is the strand that gives the picture its only genuine spine of social argument. Kate Hudson's Jesse and her sister Gabi arrive with partners chosen against the wishes of Earl and Florence, parents whose racism and homophobia are presented plainly and then dismantled over a picnic table and a Skype call. Gabi's wife Max and their son are not a punchline. The film asks the older generation to accept their daughters, and it does so with a straight face. This is not nothing. It is, however, brief, and it sits inside a machine built to sell reconciliation as a Mother's Day card.

Elsewhere the film is content to be weightless. There is no environmental conscience, no quarrel with money or class, no interest in body image, no neurodivergent character, and no historical claim of any kind. Women here are single mothers, authors, and designers, and nearly all of them are resolved through a man, a marriage, or a child. The moralizing that does occur is soft-edged and quickly forgotten, more Hallmark than sermon. The critics were unkind, and the Razzie voters unkinder. Marshall died months later, leaving behind a pleasant, shapeless thing, faintly progressive by accident and entirely of its moment.