Butler's Cinema Scene

Patricia Arquette, Angela Bassett, Felicity Huffman

“OTHERHOOD” My rating: C+

100 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Thank God for Patricia Arquette, Angela Bassett and Felicity Huffman.

These three classy thesps  make “Otherhood” bearable and intermittently entertaining.

The premise of Cindy Chupack’s film finds three old friends in upstate New York lamenting the indifference with which  their sons ignore Mother’s Day.

Thus the film’s title: once mothers, these three women now find themselves “others.”

But the gals aren’t gonna take it.  They load up an orange Volvo station wagon and tool down to NYC to surprise their errant offspring.

Carol (Bassett) discovers that her son Matt (Sinqua Walls) is the art director of a “lad” magazine (aimed at horny single guys) with a different girl every night.

Gillian (Arquette) finds her son Daniel (Jake Hoffman) struggling not only with a stillborn writing career but a breakup with his longtime girlfriend (Heidi Gardner).

Helen (Huffman) swoops down on the gay-centric apartment of her kid Paul (Jake Lacy) and throws a few hissy fits that alternately amuse and appall Paul’s roomies.

All of this is fairly preposterous.  At least the screenplay by Chupack and Mark Andrus (from a novel by William Sutcliffe) generates a few chuckle worthy lines:

“Nothing says ‘I don’t want to talk to you’ like a text.”

“The key to a clean house is a dead husband.”

The yarn follows a fairly predictable trajectory…not only do the three ladies from Yonkers turn their sons’ lives around, but they learn about themselves in the process.

The three stars are nothing if not professionals…they can sell even this sort of snake oil and make it look easy. The supporting players are as good as they need to be.

The quiet stars of the production are costume designers Patricia Field and Molly Rogers, who have so carefully chosen the characters’ wardrobes to reflect their personalities that you can get a read on each of them just by a glance at their footwear.

| Robert W. Butler