Mommy Dearest

Mother Directed by Bong Joon-ho Runtime: 128 min.

Make Way for Tomorrow (Criterion DVD) Directed by Leo McCarey

In a telling cultural twist, Criterion advertises its DVD release of Leo McCarey’s 1937 Make Way for Tomorrow as the film that inspired Yasujiro Ozu’s 1953 Tokyo Story. It’s as if McCarey’s very American tale of an elderly couple who become a burden to their adult children—a genuine Hollywood masterpiece—needed clout from art-house exotica. This parallels the festival circuit’s current enthusiasm for Korean director Bong Joon-Ho’s Mother, a tribute to parenthood that only differs from Hollywood family genre in the way it shifts and perverts Hollywood sentiment into ugliness.

Bong’s Mother isn’t any different than Hollywood warhorses Stella Dallas, Mildred Pierce and Madame X, in which mothers sacrifice their own happiness for the good of their children. But it isn’t nearly as good as those; it simply avoids Hollywood’s classic emotional largesse. Rather than emphasize unconditional love, Bong offers nihilism instead. This is a murderous Mother’s Day tribute where an overprotective Korean woman (Kim Hye-ja) turns social scourge when her only child, an emotionally-challenged son, is convicted of murdering a teenage girl. Convinced of her child’s innocence, Kim investigates the murder, stepping beyond her homemaker’s comfort zone and confronting gang members, street toughs and the decadent adolescent underworld.

Unlike middle-class, fur-coat wearing Joan Bennett staring down criminals to protect her daughter in Max Ophuls’ great 1950 The Reckless Moment, working-class Kim becomes deviously ruthless, even violent—a Miike heroine stuck in trendy melodrama. At its heart, Mother is shamelessly sentimental; Bong is simply cold-blooded about the motherly pains he wants us to enjoy. As in his overrated sci-fi monster movie The Host, Bong uses outrageous, over-scaled violence to offset his superficial look at family dynamics. His heroine’s Columbo-Mickey Spillane act—in which a matriarch takes on aggressive traits associated with the patriarch—distracts from possible nostalgic responses.

This bloody truth about motherhood isn’t deep; it only appeals to the hipster cliché of opposing traditional hierarchies. And just as The Host’s cautionary tale became a stock anti-American thriller, Mother is about the “dark” side of family life, the murderous reality beneath society’s surface and a mother’s nurturing facade. Mother evokes neither Pudovkin’s 1925 Russian Revolutionary epic Mother nor Albert Brooks’ inspired 1996 genetic satire Mother. It recalls grisly forensic television dramas like the various CSIs as well as David Fincher horror flicks Se7en and Zodiac. Born just a few years after Fincher, Bong seems a product of the same modish cynicism that is rampant in prime-time television and hipster cinema. He confuses genres rather than delving deeper into his subjects. A facile talent, Bong favors cluttered compositions, shifts in and out of focus for trite suspense; he hides or reveals information for generic rather than naturalistic purposes. Clearly, he’d rather make movies about rampaging squids than about a parent whose knowledge of the world and human nature translates to tentacles reaching into and exposing society’s cruelty and life’s unfairness.

Through Bong’s adolescent fascination with symbolic monsters and frivolous thrills, he ignores Kim’s individuality. The opening shot of her dancing in a field suggests the resilient, still-youthful spirit inside—the wiliness children don’t suspect about their elders. Bong neglects her interior and predictably goes with the Lady Vengeance prototype—however preposterously lethal, a noxious sentimentality.

Whereas Make Way for Tomorrow must be the greatest movie about how children don’t know their parents. In a culture that profitably prefers to flatter misunderstood youth, this may explain its box-office failure and obscurity. Its esteemed reputation among select cinephiles holds that it is an unremittingly sad portrait of old-age, social redundancy and fatalism: retirees Bark and Lucy Cooper (Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi) are evicted from their home and taken in separately by their children. But Criterion’s resurrection reveals a film consistent with McCarey’s career as comedy director extraordinaire.

Make Way takes a gently comic look at tragic inevitability. Its title certainly implies death but from McCarey’s absolutely perfect opening 10 minutes, setting out the Cooper family dilemma, it features an uncanny mixture of the comic and tragic fit together in recognizably common, parent-child relations. McCarey balances the forlorn and whimsical, as in a storeowner frisking a giggly kid for contraband, or Bark stumbling by an employment agency while we note his irrelevance to the labor market. These piercing moments are Chaplinesque—just as Lucy’s “favorite child” scene, ending with a dissolve (it’s an interlude) that seals its pain in one’s memory, is also Chaplinesque. In Tokyo Story’s old-couple tale, Ozu’s methods are not necessarily superior. Accepting sorrow and irony was Ozu’s trade, just as comedy shaded with spiritual realism was McCarey’s.

I first saw Make Way for Tomorrow at Columbia grad school among its 16mm print library, along with Julien Duvivier’s 1936 Fin du Jour, a French film about forgotten seniors at an old age home; Duvivier’s liveliness makes a better parallel than Ozu. McCarey’s final sequences where the Coopers forsake parental duty and revisit their honeymoon landmarks in NYC recalls the city visit in Sunrise and nothing in Tokyo Story can match its respect for a couple’s harmony and ageless affection. Released the same year as the hilariously romantic The Awful Truth, Make Way for Tomorrow deserves proper reassessment. It’s not a death story. Freed of Hollywood’s usual glamour—and youth-worship—it is a spiritual, enduring love story with the most powerful ending in the history of screwball comedy.