Parenting doesn’t come with a user manual and there’s never going to be a perfect solution to every situation. But this award season is full of films with mothers who make decisions and sacrifices that will be debated well beyond WhatsApp chats, school drop offs and personal therapy sessions.
Is the decision that Teyana Taylor’s “One Battle After Another” revolutionary activist Perfidia Beverly Hills makes to go on the lam and abandon her young child an act of selfishness and self-preservation? Or is it a means of saving her daughter from the dangers of growing up with her, someone who regrets becoming a parent? Is it right for “Sinners’” Grace (Li Jun Li) to sacrifice the last surviving humans at a juke joint to a swarm of vampires if it means she may be able to save the child she has back at home? Is Rose Byrne’s Linda in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” acting on the best interest of her daughter’s medical care? Or is she burned out and drowning in the exhaustiveness of feeding tubes, doctor’s appointments and everything else life throws at her?
Mary Bronstein, who wrote and directed “Legs” based on her own experiences (and who appears in the film as a doctor unsympathetic to Linda’s plight), says that “there’s a fantasy fulfillment” to her film; that she couldn’t speak out in parenting support sessions or leave her child at a hotel unsupervised… but Linda can.
“When you have a child with special needs, or when you’re in a crisis situation with your child, everybody is placating you and trying to make you feel better by saying, ‘It’s not your fault,’” she says.
She describes these feelings as both confusing and guilt-inducing because “you’re also positioned as the main person that’s in charge of helping your child.”
Told from Linda’s point of view, “Legs” shows a caretaker unraveling. The disorder the character’s daughter has is deliberately never named. Bronstein says that choice was made because, if it was named, then it becomes a movie “about a specific illness that a mother is trying to fix or find a cure for.” The daughter’s face is also hidden for most of the movie, and much screentime is fixated on Linda, with her increasingly greasy hair and dark shadows under her eyes. Bronstein also added the sly twist that Linda is a therapist, meaning her entire world is supposed to be about caring for other people.
“A big part of this movie centers on the trauma that Linda is experiencing, that Linda holds within her body,” Bronstein says. “The trauma of different things that have happened with the daughter, those are things that she has hidden away in the back of her mind. And one very major one reveals itself to her and slaps her in the face.”
Bronstein says that “with trauma, I believe that you do hold it in your body somewhere and, if you don’t deal with it, it’s going to get you at some point. And you can’t run away from it, because it’s not external; it’s internal.”
Whatever audiences might think of Linda and her decisions, the concept of parental trauma is also seen on film this year in mothers who adhere closer to the textbook definition of “good” parents. Jessie Buckley’s Agnes in “Hamnet” is angry at herself as much as she is guilt-ridden that she couldn’t save one child because she was so fixated on protecting another. Kate Hudson’s wounded musician Claire in “Song Sung Blue” can only see to help her daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson) after she puts on her own oxygen mask and gets sober. “KPop Demon Hunters’” Celine (Yunjin Kim) teaches her adoptive daughter to feel shame and hide her true self rather than discuss her otherness.
In director Eric Lin and screenwriter Marilyn Fu’s “Rosemead,” which is based on a true story covered in a 2017 Los Angeles Times piece, Lucy Liu’s Irene must weigh how her own terminal cancer diagnosis will impact her teenage son Joe’s (Lawrence Shou) newly diagnosed schizophrenia. Coping with all of this, as well as the recent loss of her husband to cancer and cultural stigmas toward therapy, Western medicine and mental disorders, Irene uses stoicism to hide her own fears. She both supports her son by joining him in his therapy sessions, even if they make her uncomfortable, and attempts to protect him from ostracization within the community by lying about why he’s there when he’s seen going into these sessions.
“I think there’s a shame behind it [and] I don’t think it’s just solely the Asian community,” she says of reaction to Joe’s diagnosis and treatment. “It’s a stigma that everyone holds that therapy is for someone who really has a problem, and nobody wants to be known as somebody who has a problem or an issue.”
The reality, she continues, “is that we all have to process something that happens to us, whether it’s severe or not.”
In fact, the movie centers so much on Irene’s dedication and concern for her son that it’s easy to forget just how sick she is until her doctor gives her the final diagnosis.
Liu thinks Irene’s grief over the loss of her husband plus “the secrecy and the hiding and the stories she made up to try to fit into society, and to also make sure that her son was not sequestered from the community or from other kids … that struggle already was so difficult on top of the physical illness that she was experiencing.”
“The corporal body was weak, but her inner willpower and her courage and her love for her son was really strong,” Liu says. “That dynamic tension [and] that urgency sort of fills the time on screen. Her personality comes through with the urgency of trying to save her son because she’s losing her son even though he’s right there in the house.”
The movie ends with Irene making the only decision she deems possible, a parental act of both love and fear.
“It’s definitely going to spark conversation, and it should really create a comfortable, safe place for discussion and reaction because it is such a powerful moment of choice for her,” Liu says of the finale. “It’s obviously not for everyone, but it’s a haunting reality that that if it weren’t true, nobody would believe it. I think the legacy that she left behind is something to hold up in our community and others to say that things can become like this if you don’t take these simple steps.”
Liu says that parents are taught to be present and work with their children in their current situations, but they also inevitably “futurize or try to live in another fantasy world.” She says she thinks Irene’s decision is “symbolic of how lonely she was and how isolated she was, and how real it was to her.”
She doesn’t know if her own family has experiences with mental disorders, saying, “I don’t know enough about my history because there has been so much secrecy in our own family.” But she says she has seen in society that “everyone wants to solve the puzzle — and it’s not a puzzle to be solved. It’s a puzzle to be lived. And that’s something that people just don’t want to believe because they’re not really living it the way that you are.”
