Stepmom
USA/Germany 1998
Reviewed by Andy Richards
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Divorced lawyer Luke Harrison lives in a Manhattan apartment with his girlfriend, Isabel Kelly. Isabel has a successful career as a fashion photographer, but is inexperienced at looking after Luke's two children, 12-year-old Anna and seven-year-old Ben, when they come round to stay. Their mother, Jackie Harrison, is scornful of the younger woman's attempts to mother her children, who are resentful of Isabel, and long for their father and mother to reconcile. Isabel takes them to one of her photo shoots in Central Park, but they become bored, and Ben gets lost. He is soon recovered, but Jackie is furious with Isabel, and threatens to get a court order preventing her from seeing Anna and Ben again.
After hospital tests, Jackie is told that she has cancer. She secretly embarks on a course of chemotherapy. Luke tells Jackie that he and Isabel are getting married. The children are upset by this news, but Isabel gradually begins to win their affection. As the side-effects of her treatment take hold, Jackie is increasingly forced to rely on Isabel's help with the children, and eventually reveals her illness to Isabel and her family.
Isabel is told that her quality of work is slipping because of the distraction of the children. She resigns. Isabel offers Anna advice on her love life, and their friendship develops. Jackie asks Isabel to take some photos of her and the children together. Jackie is told that the chemotherapy has failed. She opts to spend her remaining time at home with her children, making her peace with Isabel for their sake. On Christmas morning, Jackie says a formal goodbye to Anna and Ben. She invites Isabel into the family photo, and clasps her hand.
Review
Chris Columbus has made films that evinced a certain cynicism about the workings of conventional families. Both Home Alone (in which Macaulay Culkin's Kevin pointed out that "families suck") and Mrs. Doubtfire were energetic, irreverent farces, intrigued by forms of domestic dysfunction. Columbus went on to direct Nine Months and to produce the Schwarzenegger vehicle Jingle All the Way, both of which offered up disturbingly conservative visions of parenthood, the former preoccupied with a regressive conception of 'naturalness' and the latter with a deadening materialism and a fantasist's view of fatherhood. Stepmom may switch the emphasis from fathers to mothers, and downplays Columbus' penchant for slapstick sitcom in favour of a more restrained form of melodrama, but the vision follows this deepening conservative trend.
The fulcrum of the drama here is the gradual replacement of Susan Sarandon's idealised career-mother Jackie with Julia Roberts' apprentice mother (and successful young professional) Isabel. The dynamic between the two actresses is the film's strong suit, the tension of the deposed older woman facing off against her younger rival managing to generate sparks whatever the risible excesses of the script. Consequently, Ed Harris' Luke is almost wholly marginalised (significantly, Isabel is the first person Jackie tells she has cancer, not Luke). Sarandon is characteristically effective, but there is something disconcerting about the conception of Jackie. The script tries to strip her of her sexuality, allowing her to respond to Isabel's patronising observation that she is "mother earth incarnate" with nothing more than a stoical smile (the film would be unable to countenance Jackie having a new lover of her own). Following her cancer diagnosis, Sarandon plays Jackie with something of the hard-won grace that served her so well as Sister Helen Prejean in Tim Robbins' Dead Man Walking. Here, however, it shades uncomfortably close to smug self-righteousness, a willed saintliness that will entail her children always idolising her above Isabel. The reconciliation of the two women, we are reminded, is forced by circumstance rather than actively desired.
Isabel, for her part, is not permitted to sustain a viable alternative to Jackie's earthiness. She is alarmingly eager to jettison her successful, creative career (as Jackie once did) for the children; within the film's terms, career and motherhood are incompatible roles, with creativity diverted into domestic craftwork (Stepmom, like Nine Months, constructs 'motherhood' with reverential awe). There is no mention of a nanny, let alone any discussion of Luke giving up his career, and no mention of Isabel's desire for any children of her own with Luke. Ultimately, Stepmom remains too glossy, contrived and schematic to sustain the interest; its pat, melodramatic pronouncements endeavour simply to reconstitute its divided family without interrogating its essential structures. But if the film leaves us little the wiser about the issues facing real step-parents, it at least manages to resolve the thorny ethics of whether or not to take a 12-year-old girl to a Pearl Jam concert on a school night.
Credits
- Producers
- Wendy Finerman
- Chris Columbus
- Mark Radcliffe
- Michael Barnathan
- Screenplay
- Gigi Levangie
- Jessie Nelson
- Steven Rogers
- Karen Leigh Hopkins
- Ron Bass
- Story
- Gigi Levangie
- Director of Photography
- Donald M. McAlpine
- Editor
- Neil Travis
- Production Designer
- Stuart Wurtzel
- Music
- John Williams
- ©Global Entertainment Productions GmbH & Co. Film KG
- Production Companies
- Columbia Pictures presents a Wendy Finerman production
- A 1492 production
- Executive Producers
- Patrick McCormick
- Ron Bass
- Margaret French Isaacs
- Julia Roberts
- Susan Sarandon
- Pliny Porter
- Associate Producer
- Paula DuPré Pesmen
- Production Co-ordinator
- Kate Kelly
- Unit Production Manager
- Lenny Vullo
- Location Manager
- Joseph E. Iberti
- Assistant Directors
- Geoff Hansen
- Stephen Lee Davis
- Kenneth G. Brown
- Script Supervisor
- Eva Z. Cabrera
- Casting
- Ellen Lewis
- Associate:
- Marcia De Bonis
- Voice:
- The Reel Team
- Camera Operators
- Anastas Michos
- Alec Hirschfeld
- Visual Effects
- Rhythm & Hues Studios
- Visual Effects Supervisor:
- Theresa Ellis
- Special Effects
- Todd R. Wolfeil
- Robert J. Scupp
- Art Director
- Raymond Kluga
- Set Decorator
- George De Titta Jr
- Costume Designer
- Joseph G. Aulisi
- Wardrobe Supervisors
- Michael Adkins
- Kendall Errair
- Key Make-up Artist
- Michael Bigger
- Key Hair Stylist
- Patricia Grande
- Titles
- Nina Saxon
- Opticals
- Cinema Research Corporation
- Guitar Solos
- Christopher Parkening
- Orchestrations
- John Neufeld
- Supervising Music Editor
- Ken Wannberg
- Music Editor
- Katherine Quittner
- Music Scoring Mixer
- Shawn Murphy
- Soundtrack
- "Under Pressure" by David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, John Deacon, Brian May, Roger Taylor, performed by Queen & David Bowie; "Il signor Bruschino" by Gioacchino Rossini, performed by The National Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Ricardo Chailly; "Delicious" by Janice Marie Johnson, Perry Kibble, Pete Lorimer, Richard Vission, Mike Bradford, performed by Pure Sugar; "Rhythm of the Road" by Bill Nershi, performed by String Cheese Incident; "When the Lights Go Out" by Mike Percy, Tim Lever, Eliot Kennedy, Sean Conlon, Jason Brown, Richard Dobson, Richard Breen, Scott Robinson, John McLaughlin, performed by 5ive; "Green Onions" by Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper, Lewis Steinberg, Al Jackson Jr, performed by Booker T. & the M.G.s; "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" by Valerie Simpson, Nickolas Ashford, performed by Marvin Gaye, Tammi Terrell; "If I Needed You" by Townes Van Zandt; "This Land Is Your Land" by Woody Guthrie; "Baby Love" by Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, Edward Holland Jr, performed by The Supremes
- Sound Mixer
- Tod Maitland
- Re-recording Mixers
- Gary Summers
- Randy Thom
- Re-recordist
- Ronald G. Roumas
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Robert Shoup
- Dialogue Editors
- Michael Silvers
- Gwendolyn Yates Whittle
- Sara Bolder
- Sound Effects Editors
- Christopher Scarabosio
- Susan Sanford
- ADR
- Hugh Waddell
- Foley
- Artists:
- Dennie Thorpe
- Jana Vance
- Mixers:
- Tony Eckert
- Sandina Bailo-Lape
- Medical Technical Adviser
- Alan Sickles
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Phil Nelson
- Animals
- Animal Actors Inc
- Animal Trainers
- Steve McAuliff
- Carol McAuliff
- Cast
- Julia Roberts
- Isabel Kelly
- Susan Sarandon
- Jackie Harrison
- Ed Harris
- Luke Harrison
- Jena Malone
- Anna Harrison
- Liam Aiken
- Ben Harrison
- Lynn Whitfield
- Doctor Sweikert
- Darrell Larson
- Duncan Samuels
- Mary Louise Wilson
- school counsellor
- Andre Blake
- Cooper
- Russel Harper
- photo assistant
- Jack Eagle
- craft service man
- Lu Celania Sierra
- Lauma Zemzare
- Holly Schenck
- Michelle Stone
- Annett Esser
- Monique Rodrique
- photo shoot models
- Sal Mistretta
- Rex Hays
- Alice Liu
- Chuck Montgomery
- ad executives
- Mak Gilchrist
- Rapunzel
- Dylan Michaels
- prince
- David Zayas
- Jose Ramon Rosario
- policemen
- Lee Shepherd
- desk sergeant
- George Masters
- maître d'
- Anthony Grasso
- waiter
- Robert F. Alvarado
- soccer coach
- Sebastian Rand
- Tucker
- Michelle Hurst
- nurse
Jason Maves- Brad Kovitsky
- Julie Lancaster
- flight attendant
- Charlie Christman
- Stone Fox
- Amina Asep
- Naama Katz
- Jennifer Best
- Robin Fusco
- Jessica M. Oslas
- Electra Telesford
- Michelle L. Brady
- Anna's friends
- Zachary M. Hasak
- Jordan Gochros
- Rob London
- James Ostrofsky
- Chad Lavinio
- Brad's friends
- John Sadowski
- Matthew Doudounis
- Ben's friends
- Andrea Dolloff
- cocktail waitress
- Certificate
- 12
- Distributor
- Columbia Tristar Films (UK)
- 11,243 feet
- 124 minutes 55 seconds
- Dolby digital/SDDS
- Colour by
- Technicolor
- Anamorphic [Panavision]