Le combat de ma mère

Kathy Bates and Edward Furlong were great. The story flowed and at times was a tear jerker. One couldn't help but root for the family and their drive to have a home called their own. One mother's desire to hold her family together at all costs. Not an Oscar winner, but a real down to earth humanistic story all can relate to. A MUST SEE.

This movie was as close to home as it gets. We were not as poor as the Lacey's, but some of our Christmas's were skimpy. I particularly thought the casting was good and the plot line was very believable. When my grandparents first got indoor plumbing, the whole family gathered at their house to celebrate. No more long cold trips during winter! I imagine that most people who watched this movie was critiquing the character development and other mundane points, but anyone who has been lacking the common necessities was looking at this in a far different light. At first I thought more interaction with between Murray and the junkyard owner would have helped, then I realized that this was about Frances and her struggle to provide for her children. Some of the kids characters were never developed but it didn't matter. They were shown to be suffering during the bad times and enjoying the good times. I want to watch it again to see what I missed.

My wife is usually the only one in my family that will watch this type of movie. We call it a "mother's movie". But she got me at a weak moment and I watched it and I liked it a lot. I think that it was certainly Kathy Bates and Soon-Tek-Oh that kept it going. At the beginning the narrator states that it is a true story. I watched it with the thought that this was something that actually did happen. At the end of the credits it says that the above story is ficticious etc. with that usual speel. Now I don't know what to believe. Was it real or just made up. I wish I could find out the truth.

I know a lot of folks talked about this movie being so heartwrenching, and at time a tear jerker, but this movie is as close to my childhood as I can imagine. We weren't quite as poor, but I really grew up in a half-finished house and we were pretty tight on money. We never finished our house, but my mom sent three kids to damn good colleges and private schools while supporting us on a teacher's salary.

And Kathy Bates nailed it just right. I think that this movie portrays a lot of things about people who are struggling to get by, and it does it in a way that is very evenly balanced. I mean, her character is mostly sympathetic, but she shuts people out too. She's proud to a fault. She wants so much to do it all on her own, that she doesn't seem to realize just how much help she needs. That sense that she is all alone in it; that's how we felt. I'm sure that's how my parents felt. I liked how she found friends who knew how to handle her pride and still help her.

I loved this movie but it is hard for me to watch!

I never got nails for Christmas, though!

I think the bit about the disclaimer that this is all fiction is just the standard CYA language the lawyers put in at the end of every movie. There's lots of novels that are "fiction" that are true.

The narrator of this story is supposedly the 13 year old, oldest son of the family the film is about, and he starts out by saying it's all true. Kathy Bates plays Mrs. Lacey, the mother to 5 children, the widow of an Irish Catholic SOB, as she repeatedly refers to him. They're poor, and on a lurch, pack up and leave their dumpy apartment in L.A. for who knows where. They end up in Idaho, working for a Japanese man who's also a widow, making a home out of a shack on his land. You see (feel) the struggles of a parent, a mother, and not only that, but a single parent and mother of 5 children who has practically no money. You see the relationships between siblings and between the children and their mother. You see the resourcefulness and hard work ethic of the mother, sometimes taken too far, to the detriment of her own children (shunning the priest's attempts at helping out with free clothes or food or Christmas presents). You see the struggles of the oldest boy, a 13 year old son, taking on responsibility as the "man of the house," yet also being told to go get his father's belt for whippings from his mother. The mother finds work in a bowling alley, and you see her struggles with dating the bowling pro who works there. Every penny meant so much to them, that when their house is burning down, the oldest daughter risks her life to run inside and find the money jar, and cries on her mother when she has to tell her she couldn't find it. One of the sons discovers a junk yard on the way home on the schoolbus and ends up making many visits, scavenging various items for the house, pulling it all the way home on a make-shift wagon. As someone else already commented, the Christmas morning scene is poignant, as is the ending of the film. The ending was just another beginning, I would think, for this family.