One nice thing about being home temporarily is that I have the ability to see movies again. Since coming home, I've seen Atonement, Juno, Michael Clayton, and--today--a film called Definitely, Maybe that tried to be cute but ultimately didn't deliver.
The basic premise of Definitely, Maybe, in case you've missed the eight million trailers for it, is that a little girl who has lived all her life with only her father is finally hearing the story of who her mother is. Her father decides to tell the story with names and some facts changed, so that the girl has to guess which of three women her father was involved with is her real mother. As seems to be the rule with all such movies these days, the entire story takes place in Manhattan (except for a brief bit at the end in a part of "trendy" Brooklyn that I recognized immediately as DUMBO), because we all know that human dramas don't really count off of that little island between the Hudson and East Rivers.
Died-in-the-wool Democrats, I suppose, will get a kick out of the opening bits of the movie, in which the father is involved in Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign. Frankly, I find this kind of realism in movies more annoying that entertaining. There was a time when the entertainment media actively avoided using the names of real politicians in entirely fictional stories. But I digress.
The truly annoying things about this movie, to me, were, first, that its whole context is so heavily Manhattan Yuppie; and second, that it left a couple gaping holes that needed resolution. The father goes from being first in his class at UW-Madison to a low-level Clinton staffer to a prominent political consultant to an advertising executive. With one notable exception, the other characters in the movie have similar career projections. Generally, I have difficulty getting wrapped up in the problems or "problems" of people in these kinds of income groups.
Gaping holes also abound in the movie. Without giving anything away, let me say that, in the end, I found it implausible that the identity of this child's mother would have been hidden from her in the first place. There are really only two situations in which I can conceive of a child's not being told the identity of its mother: when the mother abandoned the father and the child shortly after the child's birth, or when the mother is in some way reprobrate or notorious. Neither of these cases applied here.
Nonetheless, I always do get a certain joy out of seeing New York in the movies. I find I have an entirely different relationship to New York movies when I can say, "Oh...I know right where that is!" And on that, Definitely, Maybe delivered.
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1 comment:
This is actually your mother.
The @!*ed thing won't let me post under my usual ID. I don't understand why I can't reliably get in to post a comment.
I think you missed the point of Definitely, Maybe. The father was hiding the identity of the girl's mother so that he could s how her that adults have multiple relationships, some for good reasons, some for bad.
One of the most poignant moments is when the girl sees her mother stop herself from reaching out to brush her father's hair. The girl knows that brushing back hair is one of the things her mother does for people she loves. That she consciously avoids doing it shows the little girl that her parents aren't going to reconcile.
That the girl was able to urge her father to try again with the woman who was "right" for him, even though that was not her mother, was Hollywood treacle but handled in a relatively creative way.
The action of the movie could be set in any city. That it is set in New York is sheer laziness on the part of the production company. I get tired of things being set in New York. I recognize some of the locations, not from my visits to Manhattan, but from movies I've seen in previous years.
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