The Good Mother is the Anti-The Awakening

You know how usually whenever a feminist complains about something in pop culture people are like, "Oh, you're just looking for things to be offended about!"? Actually, I find whenever something pisses me off it's not because I went in expecting to hate it. It's because I expected to love it and its sexism slapped me in the face. Usually when I'm prepared for sexism I end up going, "Hey, that wasn't bad at all!" This may be why I ended up loving Iron Man and Superbad -- which I went into wearing my critical feminist goggles -- but came out of The Dark Knight and Slumdog Millionaire -- which were advertised as practically perfect in every way -- fuming over the poor treatment of their female characters.

Okay, to my credit the reason why I like the first two movies and not the other two may have more to do with characters being specifically coded as jackasses and over-reliance on cliches but ANYWAY. My point is if I'm looking for your work to do badly I may end up viewing it more charitably in the end. I kind of went into The Good Mother by Sue Miller with bad expectations, as Susan Faludi called its movie version a piece of "backlash moviemaking." Still, I thought the premise, or at least the premise as I understood it, of what to do when the man you love does something bad to your kid was interesting. But, sigh, Faludi ended up being right. Very, very right.

( Spoilers Abound for both The Good Mother and The Awakening )