Mary McNamara: 'The Lost Daughter' is a film about motherhood that everyone needs to see
Oscar season is just getting started, but the award for the best line in any movie, possibly ever, goes to Maggie Gyllenhaal's "The Lost Daughter."
"Children are a crushing responsibility," Olivia Colman's Leda says to a very pregnant woman. "Happy birthday."
The pregnant woman, Callie (a wonderful Dagmara Dominczyk), has offered Leda a piece of her own birthday cake to apologize for calling Leda a nasty name when she refused to move from her place on an Italian beach to accommodate Callie's sprawling family.
Swimming in subtext, the line signals the film's painful but clear-eyed and rigorous exploration of motherhood at a time when motherhood needs all the clear-eyed and rigorous exploration it can get.
What we've had instead, at least politically, is pretty much the same old hamster wheel of promises and punishment
