In Praise Of Difficult Mothers (And Their Difficult Daughters), Onscreen And Off
In the family drama The Tribes of Palos Verdes, in theaters this week, the warmly maternal actress Jennifer Garner plays a mother from hell. Not that her Sandy Mason is one of those ubiquitous gorgons who have eaten friends and family for dinner since movie time began, from Bette Davis's coldly bullying mater in 1942's Now, Voyager through the ice- queens in two incarnations of The Manchurian Candidate (1962 and 2004), all the way to (coming December 8th!) a wickedly funny and scary Allison Janney as Tonya Harding's monster mom in I, Tonya.
No, Sandy's a more subtly drawn woman, a sharply intelligent but damaged soul starving for affection from her self-involved husband, who's dragged her and their teenaged twins to a wealthy Southern California enclave so as to hone his career
