2024 Was a Great Year for Movie Moms
What I’ve Been Up To:
-Interviewing Nancy Reddy for Electric Literature about her must-read new book, The Good Mother Myth
-Talking about talking about periods with our sons (editor’s note: this title is no longer true)
-Recording a killer episode of The Mother of it All with Elizabeth Doerr on parenting through climate change.
For someone with two kids and approximately 100 jobs, none of which are “movie critic,” I watch a lot of movies. The movie theater is where I go whenever I can (I’m going tonight!). This is often on my set Thursday nights out (my husband gets Tuesdays), sometimes alone and sometimes with friends (one recently noted “I’ve only seen two movies this year, and they’ve both been with you, and they’ve both been about the Holocaust!” I’ll take it). It's where I ask the concessions seller if they have any frozen candies, and if I'm lucky, combine handfuls of popcorn and frozen Junior Mints to create taste bud bliss in my mouth while I wash it down with a root beer or the can of kombucha I snuck into my purse and sometimes explode over the floor of the theater. Forgive me.
I love the Oscars too. I love watching the nominations (I did not get up at 530 PST, but I did get up before my kids and watch Bowen Yang and Rachel Sennott do a bang-up job). I love dressing up as my favorite snub for my friends’ Oscar party (last year I was Barry Keoghan at the end of Saltburn, and if you’ve seen it you know that I cannot post that picture). I love coming up with movie related pun dishes to make. I love losing the Oscar pool every year because I bet on a movie no one would.
But the Oscars are for a very specific purpose. My own list of best ofs of the year (which I’ll share soon), doesn’t overlap a ton. You wouldn't know it looking at this year's nominations, but it was a tremendous year for movies featuring female directors, and actors and creators of color, and even, gasp, comedies! But also, it was a great year for motherhood in film. If you think Nightbitch was the big motherhood movie of 2024, guess again! From Sasquatches to milk chuggers, the mothers in the movies this year made me think deeply about my own journey and where we are as a society. They also made me laugh. Here are my favorite films from the year that feature motherhood and why I think they matter:
Sasquatch Sunset
The mother in this film is, you guessed it, a Sasquatch (played brilliantly by Riley Keough). But somehow that makes her more tender, more raw, then if she were human. I came for the Sasquatch sex, and I stayed for the riveting, delicate, at times brutal meditation on survival and love, and I’m not joking. A Real Pain was great, but why is no one talking about how Jesse Eisenberg not only wrote and directed and starred in a very successful film this year but also played a FUCKING SASQUATCH for like 2 hours with the entire palette of emotions at his fingertips? Incredible. If you love thinking about mothers who live very different lives than you do, this is the film for you.
Babes
I am just so honored to have seen, in my lifetime, an opening birth scene absolutely slay in the movie theater! This film is about motherhood, sure (see ritualistic burning of breast pump), but it’s really about female friendship, and female friendship through motherhood. It also has maybe the most effective falling-in-love sequence I’ve ever seen on film, and a pretty nuanced portrait of a dad (Hasan Minhaj, making me reluctantly like him). And of course, Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau are fucking hilarious. This is peak motherhood comedy without oversimplification. You will also cry into your frozen Junior Mints.
Babygirl
I will go to my grave defending this movie - which was up there with Challengers as the most fun I’ve had at a movie theater this year. When it ended, I literally pumped my fist, while a dude in the first row booed, which made me love the movie even more. It does, I think, an expert job exploring themes of desire, femininity, the maternal, and marriage. I listened to the director, Halina Reijn, speak with Anna Sale on Death, Sex and Money this week, and she described it both as a comedy (hard agree) and as an effort to have a conversation that is still very much in progress. This movie asks, what does it mean to be a normal woman? And also, how much can we get it up for a guy in an oversized suit? (The answer is very, very much). Harris Dickinson, who my husband once interviewed at Sundance so we’re basically besties, does an outstanding job oscillating between confidence and confusion, and has made me discover a love for George Michael I didn’t know I had.
Girls Will Be Girls
This movie, from India, which won the World Cinema Dramatic Audience Award at Sundance last year, is a complicated story of mother-daughter relationships, sexuality, and repression versus freedom. Best mother-daughter love triangle since me and my daughter discovered the chocolate cake at the Ikea restaurant! And a version of sexed-up teenaged girl that doesn’t always get played with so much care. Also, just a gorgeous setting. Fuck Jeff Bezos but it IS on Prime and you’ll forgive yourself.
Another Happy Day
Lauren Lapkus gives a groundbreaking performance in Nora Fiffer’s movie about post-partum dissonance, and again, female friendship! I had the pleasure of interviewing Lapkus and Fiffer on my podcast about the film, and learned that it was not just a sweet, hilarious (Lapkus carries another fabulous opening scene), and real, but also a project that itself was a vehicle for caregiver support. They do something I’ve never seen in a film before — thank the on-set childcare provider in the opening credits. I haven’t felt so seen for my post-partum experience since Tully. When this movie ended, my husband hugged me and said “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know it was like that.” You can keep your Oscars, that’s as good as it gets.
Wild Robot
As I discussed on an episode of the pod, I had high expectations for this movie that weren’t entirely met, but it’s still a good choice if you have to watch a movie with your children and you cannot stomach Home Sweet Home Alone one more time, and also cannot convince them to watch Reality Bites. The mom is, you guessed it, a robot! She has to learn how to care, and maybe even defy her programming to do it, and also gets to mother in her own way and not be punished for it. The book deal with all this with much more depth, and I can’t recommend it enough, but I’ll give two slow claps to the people at Dreamworks just for making an animated action movie about maternal instincts.
Also, this:
A big PSA for Sundance, which is just around the corner and allows you to stream several movies, including the award winners, from home the weekend of Jan 31st, for a measly $35 a ticket. Every year since 2021, when they offered virtual screenings, I’ve made an event of it. There’s nothing like watching a film you have no expectations about! This year I’m excited about a lot of films — Deaf President Now, Life After, and Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, among others.
The Oscars remind me every year that most of the best movies that are made never get awarded, often don’t even get seen by huge audiences. Even in the last few years of Sundance, I have been blown away by films like Emergency, Master, Damsel, I Didn’t See You There, and so many more — most made by female, BIPOC, or disabled filmmakers, though even white dudes get looked over in Hollywood sometimes (see the work of the late great Jeff Baena (Joshy, The Little Hours, Horsegirl), truly one of my favorite filmmakers ever, rest in peace).
LOVE this list sarah (and can't wait to watch some of these!)
BABES! yes I am reading your newsletter 6 weeks late but reading it nonetheless. Ok ok ok I’ll see babygirl and thanks for reminding me about Sasquatch sunset!