Yesterday I watched Parenthood (again) and was blown away by how tight it is, moment to moment, about family dynamics. Parenthoodhttp://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi452264729/  There's a telling dinner scene involving the picture of modern American familial promise: three grown and gainfully employed white adults gathered for an evening with their parents and their own children. Suddenly, the wild card youngest son shows up unannounced with his illegitimate biracial child named "Cool," the fruit of his alliance with a Vegas showgirl. Just for a moment the camera focuses on a smug-faced Martha Plimpton,  cast as a willfull high school senior who hides her boyfriend under the bed and thinks her mother (who attended Woodstock) is a hopeless square. Plimpton, who made a career in the eighties for playing the she-smart-ass, sums it all up with her smile, and Ron Howard does a service to the movie for giving us her s0litary sense of split-second righteousness.  Because, of course, her sense of knowing it all is overturned-- a recurring theme in this refreshing and entertaining film (1989, Ron Howard). Growing up and growing older, the film tells us, means being able to get over yourself long enough to forgive, other people as well as yourself. 

Watching it again as a parent, some twenty years after it came out, I am reminded by how much extra we can get out of a text as our situations in life change.  When Plimpton's character runs away from home after an argument with her mother, the mother (played beautifully by Dianne Wiest) does the conventional and prideful thing of telling her daughter never to come back again before she comes to her senses and runs out onto the lawn chasing her daughter. But it is not the chasing after that's as important as what she says, which is more or less, "I'll always be here if you need me... You can always come back." Wiest's words are unabashed yet woeful. She shouts out what she has to, knowing her girl's gonna keep running, and then, as the camera leaves her there in a distanced shot, says to herself "bye."  I thought this scene was nuts when I first saw this film, as a kid watching with her Indian parents on a Sunday evening. What kind of mother would let her kid runaway, I thought?

Today I think Wiest and Plimpton's relationship in the film is a paragon for mother-daughter relationships. Maybe it is that only an ex-hippy who went to Woodstock would know how to respect her almost adult daughter's boundaries, but if there was ever a film to give you a how-to on dealing with teenage rebellion, the later scenes with Julie and her mother (after the boyfriend has now become the husband) are key. "Well, she wants Todd, and I want to help you get whatever you want," says Helen (Wiest) to her younger son after he asks why she has helped the young newlyweds stay together.

Wiest's performance also reminded me of the other memorable (and mostly good) mothers she has played, including in The Birdcage, Edward Scissorhands, and my personal favorite-- the much older matriarch in Dan in Real Life. She has it in her range of understated emotions to play the kind of quick resources and flexible patience that mothers in difficult positions need. As I watched her simply accept who her daughter was and wanted to be, I also ruminated over other exemplary film mothers, some of whom are not given enough scope in their mothering scenes to exhibit this optimally (like Dianne Keaton in Something's Gotta Give).  Two films which come to mind are both indie, though one is well-known (Kissing Jessica Stein). http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi4209181465/ The other is a more recent film about Thanksgiving I saw recently on netflix instant entitled Familiar Strangers, 2008, which has in it parents who have more typical gender roles , are Wasps, and are severly strapped for the emotional resources their children need individually. http://www.netflix.com/WiSearch?hv=i3b2lH4c767ZYeaLcs7Bje9NnRE%3D&oq=&v1=familiar+strangers&search_submit=Search Yet, by the end of the film, they have managed to do and say exactly what their kids need to have done and hear.

The climactic and confessional mother-daughter scene in Kissing Jessica Stein may be my favorite instructional scene on how to parent for a long time.  Tovah Feldshuh plays the emotionally-involved, vivacious yet nurturing mother, and in the scene I am thinking of, her character goes through almost the same type of metamorphisis that Jessica's does through the course of the film. Judy Stein, sitting on the swing with her daughter on the night before her son's wedding, graciously gives up her dreams of having Jessica marry a succesful Jewish man. She quickly comes to terms with her daughter's inner conflict and unhappiness. What I love most about this scene is its esoteric quality; there is something about it that allows you in to understand that there are things only a mother could know about her daughter, but it also holds us apart as if to suggest that there are things deep in the heroine's core that the mother has learned to detect and identify without commenting on or trying to change. 

As for fathers, I'm still working on that. Steve Martin plays a good one in Parenthood, though what's more interesting is how expertly the film showcases the changing and more valuable role of fathers and "co-parenting" that began as a result of second-wave feminism.  In this film, he is the fictional prototype of all the real and fathers I see around me today.