Following my tormenting experiences with Caroline Lindy's "Your Monster" and Megan Park's "My Old Ass," two highly romantic female flicks that explore the emotional states of egotistical women, I see this other movie about self-absorbed women.
Do altruistic women still exist today? For my mother's generation, these were extremely prevalent. It is clear that female emancipation has negatively affected women's attitudes.
This time, I wasn't tortured at all because I was given the opportunity to stand back and observe how women of all ages-including the youngest, who is under ten-manage to shift the blame for their selfishness onto a selfless father, with whom I could easily identify, when he devotes all of his time to trying to provide his family with a respectable standard of living by fully immersing himself in running an art gallery.
A woman he meets promises him an excellent bargain shortly before breaking it and leaving him bankrupt. His wife just decides to go to treatment, leaving him with the kids. The little girl complains about nothing and he has to beg her to accept his excuses. And because he was so preoccupied with his gallery when she was ten, his older daughter rants at him in a hysterically manner.
None of them truly comprehends how much he loves them all and what he must endure, isolated, wrecked by circumstances and all of these women's caprices, none of them assists him in his problems. How can they be so cruel, so vindictive, and so oblivious to the offerings made by men? None of them notices his decent drowning (on the movie poster) without complaining...
As the disillusioned pregnant daughter, Mila Kunis does an outstanding performance. I have never seen her that good. I recently received the title "Gran-pa", and she looks exactly like my pregnant daughter. And OMG, her kind and hysterical moments are just one to one copies of the extremes I had to go through with mine.
Goodrich even introduces himself as gran-pa to youngest girl he meets at the end. My daughter prevented me from experiencing that wonderful moment, therefore it was truly the movie's best scene that made me smile with a tear.
The film began slowly, hence the six stars, with the usual cliche of a clumsy father left alone with his children (which was never an issue for me), but by the second half, everyone was at the party when he drowned, and the film became much more original and engaging.
