Amazon.com Essential Video
When Albert Brooks cast Debbie Reynolds to play his mother in this acclaimed 1996 comedy, the veteran singer-dancer-actress hadn't had a leading film role in nearly 30 years. Brooks had to pour on the charm to persuade her to make a comeback. The results were triumphant for writer-director Brooks and his on-screen mom, who earned some of the best reviews of their respective careers. The movie's about a science-fiction writer named John (Brooks), who's just weathered a second divorce and blames his failure with women on his dysfunctional relationship with his widowed mother (Reynolds). He decides that the best way to improve his romantic future is to move back in with his mother and resolve their simmering differences--a wild leap of logic that seems outrageous to John's brother (Rob Morrow), who has always been their mother's favorite son. As this domestic experiment unfolds, Brooks uses hilarious dialogue to convey a wealth of observant detail about familial tensions and annoying quirks of behavior.
Mother is a movie about people who know how to push each other's buttons--all the wrong buttons--and the comedy will be recognized by anyone who's ever been exasperated by one or both of their parents. That means just about everyone, doesn't it?
--Jeff Shannon
Review
Albert Brooks' Mother would be a winning achievement if only for providing Debbie Reynolds her best showcase in years, which many critics thought should have earned her an Oscar nomination. But it also makes a natural next chapter in Brooks' career-long, painfully honest examination of how neuroses stunt his recurring character type, which is as thinly autobiographical and sardonically humorous as the characters Woody Allen writes for himself. What more Freudian way to get at issues of self-loathing, romantic dysfunction, and writer's block than to have his character move back in with Mom? Brooks' deadpan frustration works wonderfully alongside the deceptive congeniality of Reynolds, a passive-aggressive woman who's frugal with both her money (she's been preserving a frozen block of cheese for years) and her positive reinforcement. Reynolds strikes a quirky balance between ingrained mothering that has become rote by repetition, and the seeming indifference bordering on resentment she has developed for her son. The film is basically a series of embarrassing episodes that flesh out their hilariously complex relationship -- she gently berates him with backhanded compliments, he openly challenges her long-standing idiosyncrasies. The character study provides the film steady propulsion toward a resolution that helps them see each other as real people, rather than family members long ago taken for granted. And when this involves Brooks grappling with his mother's ongoing sex life, well, that's just the writer/director at his stomach-churning best. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide
DVD ~ Albert Brooks
DVD ~ Rick Beckner
DVD ~ Brendan Fraser
