 |
 Irene Dunne plays Mama, the head of a Norwegian family that lives in San
Francisco in the early part of the twentieth century. She and her hubby use
"great humor and hope, amid genteel poverty" to bring up their four kids.
Relatives, illness and near-death all cause the family to come together and to
Mama, "the one person who can make things right". The back of the box also
notes this was nominated for five Academy Awards. 1948, 134 minutes, VHS
To: Kathryn Forbes
From: MonsterHunter Publishing
Re: Your Submission We are in receipt of your stories about your mama that you've gone and turned
into a movie. Since we aren't in the practice of actually reading books here,
we were forced to watch the movie version of your book, Mama's Bank Account. Since our own mama always told us to say something a little positive so that
the truth won't sting as bad, it is clear that while the title of your movie, I Remember Mama, doesn't exactly scream "summer franchise" or "tentpole movie", it
is a distinct improvement over the 70 to 80 year-old skewing Mama's Bank Account.
Our experience tells us that the only time the word "bank" works in a picture
is when the words "robber" or "robbery" follow and even then we would probably
want a Heath Ledger type attached to it. Watching this movie supposedly based
on your Norwegian mama's misadventures in San Francisco in 1910, one can only
come to the conclusion that the reason this concept sounds so obscure on its
face is because it is in fact obscure and is somehow even less interesting than
your rather self-indulgent and banal set-up sounds. Could your mama do any
less in this movie? Are you sure that our audience is supposed to believe that
a simple woman from Norway could overcome such soul-shattering odds as a sick
kitten or a child with an earache? We can only assume that you felt your
mother's war against indigestion and the time she had a bad haircut was simply
too much for the audience to handle. If that is the case, then we salute you
for your restraint. Unfortunately, your restraint did not extend to your
film's two hour plus duration, which lead us to wonder whether your mama
discovered the new world, went to the moon, and started the U.N. in her
lifetime. A cursory review of the film shows us that while none of these
sequences are in the film, there is a scene where she discusses when you would
be
old enough to drink coffee. Thankfully, we are old enough to drink coffee and
much was needed during our screening of your film.  As you may have been able to discern (good writers are after all quite
observant, are they not?) from the foregoing paragraph, we have some serious
reservations regarding your submission. As we understand it, Irene Dunne plays
Mama, who is your mama and Barbara Bel Geddes plays you, the daughter who
harbors a desire to be a writer (we harbor a desire to be a size 2, but that
ain't necessarily going to happen either). The movie tells the story of how
you wrote about growing up with Mama and Papa, who is played by Reunion In France survivor Philip Dorn. You have a brother and some sisters as well as
one of those extended families that all you immigrants seem to have (don't you
leave anyone back in the home country? We have this image of Norway being a
bunch of abandoned igloos overrun by reindeer.) The point of your story seems
to be some type of fond recollection about what a sacrificing saint your mother
was, always putting off getting herself a warm coat so that she could waste the
family's money on stuff like medical emergencies and high school for your
brother named Nels (you'll probably want to change his name to something like
Bret or Kyle since in this country the name Nels would remind everyone of Nell
Carter). This is obviously just some type of pathetic wish-fulfillment stuff
because all of us know that living with a mama who is a tightwad and always in
our face about all the sacrificing they do isn't all that it's cracked up to
be. You just want to say, "yeah, yeah, that's great that you put off those
cancer treatments again so that you could buy me Grand Theft Auto: Vice City,
but you're blocking the screen and I've almost completed the first mission".
Besides, I'm sure that with all this sacrificing, Papa is wondering why Mama is
always wearing twelve layers of baggy clothes. How do you expect Papa to
remember Mama when she's got that whole schoolmarm look going on? I guess
since her sisters look like Oskar Holmulka in drag or like Shelley Duvall's
not-so-skinny cousins, she's pretty sure he isn't likely to forget her fairly
womanly look any time soon.  We notice that you make some earnest attempts to utilize the "whacky family"
aspect of things and that's not a bad idea. It worked to great success in My Big Fat Greek Wedding in spite of how vapid that movie was. People are easily tricked into liking
goofs with foreign accents, especially when its a bunch of noisy, bossy women.
Here, you have Mama who is pretty bossy by any stretch and her sisters sure try
to be bossy, but there's very little humor in any of this. In fact, the most
you get out of anyone is when your Mama throws out her quickly forgotten and
just as quickly loathed catch-phrase, "eeese gude" whenever she wants to make
some kind of point, like how much money she still has left after budgeting for
a ten cent notebook for one your sisters. To your credit, you do bring in
Uncle Chris, the loud, obnoxious uncle who limps and takes no guff from his
ugly nieces, but has a soft spot in his head for you and your mama, but he
doesn't get to do enough and your efforts to redeem him at the end of the movie
by revealing that he had spent all of his money paying the medical bills of
kids who have leg problems, seems forced at best and a little bit creepy at
worst. Still, we think the plot point where he married his housekeeper in
secret as well as when he was dressing down the funeral parlor owner who was
going to marry one of Mama's sisters and wanted Chris to provide him a dowry
for her, were high points in an otherwise unremarkable family drama. Uncle
Chris also taught some cripple how to cuss in Norwegian whenever his legs hurt
him and I think all of us wish we had an Uncle Chris to teach us swear words
instead of having to pick them up from our dad's secret porn mag collection.
It just seems so much more meaningful when you cuss out your girlfriend
knowing that you learned it from a loved one instead of from reading a short
story that invariably starts out with the phrase "I always thought these
letters were made up, until one day I was hitchhiking near an all-girls' school
in the south..."  One of the biggest problems with all of this is that there isn't much of
anything to keep the viewer interested. You spend a good deal of time setting
up the fact that Mama is always worried about money, but there's never any
payoff, except that at the end of the movie it is revealed that Mama never had
any bank account at all! I'm guessing that maybe that revelation was much more
shocking when it was called Mama's Bank Account, but when Mama finally owns up
to her pattern of lies and deception, I was a little bit like "eeese no gude".
We are told by Mama that she only told the lie about having a bank account so
that you kids wouldn't worry about them being all poor and being dirtballs and
all. Uh, considering the fact that every time some kid wanted to get a dime to
buy a notebook from school, it required a family meeting and some elaborate
figuring from Mama along with the usual declaration that "I'll get a heavy coat
some other time" it didn't seem like she was doing much in the way of
protecting her kids from anything other than an expectation that they would be
getting an X Box or something way cool for Christmas. It was pretty neat that
you had Mama reveal all this only after you sold your first story (not sure who
you tricked into doing that, but it certainly wasn't us. Wait a second, we had
to buy your little movie didn't we? Crap!) and got paid $500. Mama may be a
martyr and a skinflint, but she's no dummy and it don't take her too long to
take charge of your $500, does it? Sure, she can reveal the truth about how
poor you all are now that you can support the family. Mama's gotta make sure
she keeps getting a healthy allowance from you, right? You better hope she
continues to lead such a fascinating life, because once Mama gets addicted to
the good life, you ain't ever going to be able to wean her off of it and you're
only going to have to keep selling more and more stories about how selfless
your greedy Mama is! Your incorporation of Uncle Chris' death feels like it was included only
because it's de riguer (Do you Norwegians even know what that means?) for these
sappy coming of age/slice of life memoirs. In fact, the movie pretty much
admits this when your character says that a writer should experience everything
including death. Well, it's been my experience that when people croak, you
don't treat it as an opportunity, like say bungee jumping or eating squid.
Aside
from your hollow treatment of death, the last bit of the movie where mother
harasses a famous author in an effort to get her to tell you to keep writing
isn't even
that hard to swallow in spite of how contrived it feels, but that's more a
testament to the fact that the viewer senses you're about finished with you
overlong yearly Christmas form letter version of your life than to whether or
not it rings true (it doesn't). Just so you don't think we're totally unfair,
none of the problems are really Irene Dunne's fault, though that accent gets on
your nerves. The material just isn't up to snuff. Here's my question to you:
since we've already seen Irene Dunne as the matriarch of a large, whacky family
in the superior Life With Father , why would we have any interest in this? In
fact, you've managed to take Life With Father and suck the life out of it. We
could probably tolerate your rather pedestrian episodes of Mama's life better
if the family were composed of characters we wanted to watch. These people
exhibit very little in the way of liveliness and whereas the family in Life With Father was loud, energetic, and always scheming about something or other
(remember when whatshisname sold the poison home remedy to unsuspecting
neighbors? Good times! Good times!), this Norwegian family was closer to
Norwegian wood. Give these people some personality. Mama and Papa could have
especially benefited from an operation to remove the sticks in their butt.
Mama comes off as this unapproachable paragon of motherhood, rather than
anything approaching a human being. Unless I'm watching a Godzilla movie, I want to see movies with humans in them. Our advice is to send your
submission to whomever you weaseled $500 out of for your first story (which
according to this movie is actually the subject of the movie, which probably
presents some sort of threat to the space-time continuum and is thus another
reason we simply can't use your submission) and see if you can trade on their
pro-mother sympathies to get them to use it. Us? We'll stick with Life With Father . Or even hit TV sitcom Mama's Family.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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