Mutter unter Beschuss

The movie starts with spontaneous fun in the family. It's a terrific sequence. I don't know when I've seen anything with two or three kids in it staged so believably. Maybe someone in charge thought that the scene was the best part of the movie, because though it goes on and on, parts of the rest of the story remain undeveloped.

Mare Winningham for the umpteenth time plays a woman who is dealt a blow by circumstance. She does it magnificently as always, but this time she has very little to work with except the basic premise of being a successful mother (as if the script didn't provide enough indications, there's a certificate on the wall dedicated to "MOM") who, together with a friend, is falsely accused of abuse.

Knowing that abusers are not always the people you'd suspect, does her family feel certain they can trust her? Can she really trust her friend? The questions are raised and then quickly cast off by the wayside. When Mare says to a friend something like, "Thank you for helping me learn how to let myself be helped," she's telling us something that the script doesn't give us much of a chance to see. When her friend raises the idea of going to Italy, it's out of the blue and not fully explained. Italy, with its fashion and design industries, is not exactly noted for a lack of sexual abuse. But here, perhaps, somebody took a detail from the true story without bothering to polish it up.

The script basically gives us one woman against the world, rather than pursuing any opportunities to play with the mix of trust and suspicion between her and the various other characters she encounters.