The New ‘Mother’s Day’ Trailer Loves You, Just Wishes You’d Call Sometimes
Having already planted his flag of squeaky-clean ethnically homogeneous courtship on New Year’s Eve with New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day with Valentine’s Day, and America’s most tragic hour with 9/11 Remembrance Day, Garry Marshall will expand his Holiday Cinematic Universe with Mother’s Day this spring. Slated for a release on April 29 — which isn’t even Mother’s Day, so what the hell — the ensemble rom-com will celebrate motherhood and all its attendant joys by, among other things, saddling Julia Roberts with a silly wig of Cageian proportions. The wig is distracting, but important, because without a severe, tight, and aggressively chic hairdo, the audience would have no way of knowing that Roberts’ character has forsaken a family of her own to tenderly breastfeed her career instead.
Hers is but a single strand of this complex narrative fishtail-braid uniting disparate lives, like Crash but with regular guilt instead of racial guilt. Be-wigged Roberts offers a job to struggling single mom Jennifer Aniston, forced to contend with her aging-but-in-a-hot-way ex (played by the aging-but-in-a-hot-way Timothy Olyphant) and his youthful new girlfriend, who is Sloane from Entourage. Aniston confides her frustrations in her best pal Kate Hudson, who’s currently going through some tsuris of her own with her mother, character actress Margo Martindale. Also in Aniston’s orbit is fellow single parent Jason Sudeikis, portraying an adult man uncomfortable with the prospect of writing the letters t-a-m-p-o-n-s. More than simply providing Aniston with a requisite romantic opposite, he will embody one of the least-explored dimensions of motherhood: being a father.
I am contractually obligated to link back to 30 Rock’s tone-perfect Martin Luther King Day parody in every news item even tangentially related to Garry Marshall and his Holiday Cinematic Universe, so there’s that, but the trailer above doesn’t seem so far from parody itself. Roberts’ wig is funny and slightly frightening, like the rainbow frightwig of a clown, and the moment where the daughter she never knew she had ambushes her at a book signing doesn’t go down so easy either. Book signings seem like a drag to begin with, having to keep a brave face while agreeing to spell some joker’s name as ‘Hayleeigh.’ Throwing a long-lost daughter in the mix must just compound an already overwhelming experience.