Mother: Look, Ma, No Therapist!

John Henderson (Brooks) is a science-fiction writer living in Los Angeles, about to finalize his second divorce. During the film’s opening credits, we see him in his near-empty home, attempting to create the illusion of normalcy by rearranging the club chair and side table that remain. Soon he’s enlisting his pal Carl to serve as both drinking buddy and designated driver. Of course, the void will still be there when John returns home, but he figures that after a double shot or three, he’ll be too sozzled to notice. Between their first and second rounds, though, Carl stops John in his tracks by asking if his wives and girlfriends were “all the same woman.”

“The one thing they all had in common: they didn’t really believe in me,” answers John. “Why do you think that is?” asks Carl.

Jump-cut to Beatrice Henderson (Reynolds), John’s deceptively perky mother, bemoaning her son’s divorce to two appliance installers, strangers she has not met previously.

In the hope of a more sympathetic ear, John appeals to his brother, Jeff (Rob Morrow), who appears to be happily married. When John confides his estrangement from Beatrice, Jeff is surprised. John is even more so when he learns that Jeff calls Beatrice every day for a pick-me-up of validation and approval.

Alas, when John reaches out to her, he hears only her disappointment about his divorce and with his writing. Jeff, a sports agent with a six-figure salary, has given Beatrice grandchildren and radiates the smugness of the favorite child. Turns out that there are not only two kinds of mothers but also two kinds of children, and John is . . . the other kind. To his eternal shame, when he meets his mother’s friends, they often exclaim, “Oh, you’re the other son.”

Who knew that Reynolds, for so much of her screen career the chirpy, uncomplicated ingenue and wife, possessed the comic chops for the complex, wily Beatrice? Her tone may be sweet as honey, but her subtle implications scorch like chili peppers. Reportedly Brooks wanted Doris Day for the role. Long retired, she declined. He met with Nancy Reagan, Maureen Stapleton, and Esther Williams, and finally offered the role of her career to Reynolds, mother of his friend Carrie Fisher.

As the son who remembers every incident of maternal disapproval he has experienced and is still stung by all of them, Brooks’s John is an impatient man-child just on the brink of adulthood. To reach his twin goals of growing up and getting to the root of his family-tree issues, he finds that patience, calm, and forgiveness are necessary. This makes the character less defensive than the ones played by Brooks in his prior films. John actively wants to make good things happen rather than wait for bad things to come.

Typically, movie comedies are spoken of in terms of script and acting. While the writing and performances are superlative here, the same can be said of Marc Shaiman’s score, reminiscent of Sergei Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé, circusy with a twist of melancholy, and of Lajos Koltai’s understated cinematography and Charles Rosen’s uncluttered production design, both of which bring the dialogue and acting into higher relief.

The film is bookended by John’s two aha moments. The first is huge: He realizes that, to have a mature relationship with a woman, he needs to build one with Mom. Has he always been attracted to women who resist fully embracing him because Beatrice has done that for years? To confirm his suspicion, he proposes that he and his mother conduct a joint research project.

He advises Beatrice that he’s coming to the Bay Area to live with her for “the experiment,” as he euphemizes what in a movie western might be called the showdown. After his four-hundred-mile drive to Sausalito, Beatrice greets him with a “you look tired.” He asks for a slightly warmer welcome before she brings on the criticism. Compliantly, she hugs John, says she’s so glad to see him, and then demands, “Why didn’t you want to stay in a hotel?”

When he gets close, Beatrice withdraws. It’s their mother-son dance.

Against her wishes, John reclaims the contents of his teenage bedroom from the garage. Here come the lava lamp and the posters of Jane Fonda as Barbarella and Jimi Hendrix as himself. John has a harder time establishing a beachhead in the kitchen, where Beatrice is curator of what her son regards as a “food museum.” Exhibits are on view in the freezer, where everything—including a block of cheese, a bag of iceberg lettuce, and a tub of orange sherbet—is well past its expiration date.

Beatrice defends the frozen crust that has formed atop the sherbet as “protective ice.” It’s also an apt image for the cold, spiky division that has formed between mother and son. John doesn’t just want to break the ice; he wants to defrost it.

Obviously, this is a challenge for adults who know so little of each other. Yet John does not regress to his teenage self and rebel against his mother. Nor does he regress to his toddler self and let Beatrice run the show. He wants nothing less than a total reset. Their experiment is radical: John spends most of the film’s running time facilitating DIY couples therapy for himself and Beatrice. Surely his thrifty mother appreciates that he isn’t shelling out money for a therapist.

Like a professional mediator, he steers their encounters away from face-offs and toward conversations. They go to the supermarket and discuss whether it’s worth spending extra on organic peanut butter. They go to the zoo, as they did when John was a boy. This time around, at the gift shop, John buys Beatrice a T-shirt with her name on it, instead of the other way around. They go on a dinner date to San Francisco. Over martinis, they toast “the experiment.” They start to enjoy each other.

There are times when they regress to old habits and patterns, Beatrice to sweet-and-sour and John to juvenile gotcha. When Mom tells the salesman at the pet shop that John just got divorced (a moment accentuated by slow motion, to convey the way John sees and hears it), he gets back at her by telling a Victoria’s Secret saleswoman that he’d like to buy crotchless underwear for Mom. But as the movie progresses, Beatrice’s needling and John’s sniping decrease precipitously. Rather than continuing to criticize the failure of his marriages, she speaks of her own romantic arrangements. Rather than playing the blame game with Beatrice, John listens.

Beatrice has had a long-standing affair with a married man and is accustomed to having him stay overnight. Still, she tells John, she is uncomfortable with her friend sleeping over while her son is in the house. Having so long regarded Beatrice as a noodge whose raison d’être was to make him feel small, John thoughtfully—if belatedly—recognizes that she is an adult with her own private life that he has never thought to inquire about. Many adult children aren’t selfless enough to take interest in their parents’ lives, but John has learned that reciprocity is the basis of all relationships, including the one with his mother. It’s the kind of insight that, while hard-earned for John, registers effortlessly in the film.

John’s second aha moment is ginormous. He senses that the source of his mother’s discomfort with him might be more about her dissatisfaction with her own life than about her vicarious embarrassment over his.

He arrives at this hypothesis when Beatrice is out to dinner with her male friend. While she’s gone, John discovers that she had a premarital vocation—writing—something that both surprises and delights him.

When he asks her about it, she’s furious about the violation of her privacy. She feels exposed. John’s discovery reveals that Beatrice, like so many mothers of the 1940s and 1950s (including Brooks’s own, singer and actress Thelma Leeds), traded a budding career to be a wife, homemaker, and mother.