motherhood

Book Review: ‘The Ice Child’

May 21, 2016 By Thelma Leave a Comment

The Ice Child by Camilla Läckberg
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow. This is a gripping Nordic noir in Camilla Lackberg’s series that, in part, charts the arc of married couple Erica Falck and Patrik Hedstrom — she’s a true-crime writer, he’s a detective — on another grisly adventure. This one begins with a traumatized young girl wandering blindly in the snow observed by a horsewoman: we won’t truly understand the significance of this scene or the depths of its evil until the very last page.

Sweden’s Lackberg works on a big canvas — there are many, many interconnected characters in these books. That can be a curse or a blessing — like a Russian novel you have to keep track of who’s who. The best way I find to do that is to take my smartphone and charge it on the opposite side of the house and just let myself go.

Lackberg’s plotting is on a plane with, is it too much to say, Agatha Christie? At the very least her plots have that level of complication and awareness that even old apparently harmless ladies have a knowledge of the world that should never be underestimated. Besides its insane page-turner quality that kept me up on succeeding nights well after a reasonable bedtime, there are so many fascinating domestic themes. Erica and Patrik and their extended families are constantly trying to achieve a work-life balance with the help-hindrances of parents and in-laws. As a married couple, they are also trying to keep a balance of passion, compassion and mutual respect in a world awash in evil (and, yes, that is no exaggeration).

One theme that fascinates me in this particular novel is reflections over and over again on the subject of mothering: what makes a good mother, what limits maternal feeling, the extent a mother will go to protect a dangerous and even deranged child. In one very quiet scene toward the book’s climax, a daughter finally asks her mother the question that the teen must have asked herself a thousand times a day: mama, why don’t you love me? It is a raw question and cuts deeply. Sitting there, in my nightgown, racing toward the end and the many final revelations that keep spinning the story in surprising directions, I paused and wondered what is that question I have for my mother — and would I ever be brave enough to ask it.

And all this while corpses pile up and cold cases thaw. Lackberg is top-shelf Nordic Noir, and if you’ve done the Steig Larsson, Jo Nesbo, Anne Holt, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir circuit, Camilla Läckberg is a must-read.

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Outtakes: Julianne Moore on Doing ‘The Hunger Games’ — Thanks to her Kids

May 27, 2015 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Jennifer Lawrence, Julianne Moore looking into the future: it isn’t pretty but they are.

De-cluttering the cutting-room floor — this time from my interview with Julianne Moore in the New York Observer that ended up concentrating on her race to the Best Actress Oscar.

Ms. Moore’s drive to be attached to quality material extends beyond the Oscar circuit. Regarding being cast in the box office hit The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, Ms. Moore confessed: “which I did call about.” She credited her children for the discovery five years ago. “I’m like here, Caleb, here’s the third volume in the series you like (because you always want 12-year-old boys to read.) And then a few years later my daughter, who’s now 12, was reading The Hunger Games. We were on vacation and I had nothing to read. I picked it up. I was like ‘this is great.’ I downloaded the other two and I read them really fast. Then in the last book there’s this character Alma Coin and I’m, like, go for that part. She was the only character I could play. And that’s how that happened. I met the director, Francis Lawrence. That was one of those projects I pursued because it was interesting.”

In the case of Mockingjay, the material was more attractive than the actual part of the severe President of District 13, a powerful figure that does not carry the narrative thread like Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen. The book interested Ms. Moore because “it’s political allegory with adolescent overtones whereas a lot of things that you read in YA are simply adolescent. There’s nothing wrong with that… but what the author Suzanne Collins did is she really wrote about political systems and ideology and rebellion turning into revolution and civil disobedience and what class systems do to people and what totalitarianism does. I read it and I was like, Jesus! And the character of Alma Coin is thin in the book. She’s not fully fleshed out in the movies either because the movie’s not about Alma Coin but she’s an interesting character with an interesting evolution.”

Eat Your Veggies, Skip the Magic Mushrooms – and More Advice for Sending Your Kid to College

August 28, 2014 By Thelma 1 Comment

Buster Keaton Goes to ‘College’

A week ago Thursday, we drove our son to college six hundred miles south where they serve grits for breakfast in the dining hall. Worried much? As a 55-year-old film critic, I’m not as desperate as the mother of a freshman leaving the nest in the current hit Boyhood, who laments that all she has ahead of her is her own death. While you don’t need to be that fatalistic, if you make the transition correctly, it should be harder on you than it will be on your kid.

Here’s how to ease your separation anxiety:

1. Surrender Your Sex Police Badge: Sure, you can slow down in the CVS condom aisle, but be cool. That ship has probably sailed during high school. If your child has watched Game of Thrones like my son, he knows more about fornication than you did after your honeymoon.

2. Become a Social Network Stalker: Is he dating? Has he grown sideburns, or joined a cult like the cheer squad? Refrain from commenting: It’s not stalking if they don’t see you hovering.

3. Eat your Veggies, Skip the Magic Mushrooms: We all did our share of drinking and toking and tripping in college – at least I did. I’d like my son to do as I say, not as I did – but he already knows what I did. While ‘just say no’ may be too much to expect – replace it with ‘just don’t get caught.’ If you must, experiment with trusted friends, in safe environments.

4. Chuck the Emotional Baggage: This is their leap into the unknown – not yours. I remember pushing my mother out of my Berkeley dorm the second we’d dumped my stuff. That may have been the one time in my entire college career that I refused a free meal. I turned out well and even brought her two grandkids to kvell from.

5. Avoid Wail Watching: Be prepared for tears. Your own. Do not expect to cry it out together. Remember when you left your kid at day care for the first time and wept all the way from the jungle gym to your Brooklyn stoop? Cry on the way home.

6. Disconnect: Don’t expect that daily phone call or text. Let them go. Just like you took your hands off their bicycle years ago and watched them wobble toward the horizon and achieve balance. You can reach out regularly but let them set the pace of their responses – the goal is to build their confidence, not undermine it.

7. Unplug the Pressure Cooker: Don’t start discussing grades before the first day of school. Yes, by their sophomore year you will be nagging your astrophysicist about their report card but now navigating new friends, purchasing razors at the drugstore and surviving a smelly roommate obsessed with techno-pop is enough to keep them busy.

8. Listen, Don’t Preach: If your son or daughter calls home depressed and doubting and overwhelmed, let the kid vent. That’s why he is calling you – and that’s a good thing. Afterwards, he will probably feel comforted. You will be up all night. Shoot a quick “feeling better?” text the next day just to confirm the cloud has passed, then pop a Xanax.

9. Consider the Nest Half Full Not Half Empty: Don’t freak out! Remember you really do like your spouse. That’s why you married him.

10. Catch the Boomerang Babies: Remember that they are not leaving home forever. Given the economy, not only will your offspring be bunking in their old room, but their spouse and kids might one day, too.

Q&A: Cate Blanchett Sniffs ‘Blue Jasmine’ – and Oscar

February 19, 2014 By Thelma Leave a Comment

In honor of the Oscars on March 2, I’m pulling up some of my Awards Season interviews, like this one of Oscar frontrunner Cate Blanchett: Between performing in "The Maids," and dining with her three sons, Cate Blanchett, 44, could be mistaken for another multi-tasking mother, struggling to juggle career and family. But in Blanchett’s case, the load also includes the burdens of being an early Oscar frontrunner – again – this time for playing the title character of Woody Allen’s latest, "Blue Jasmine." In this film, Blanchett plays a New York socialite forced to move in with sister in San Francisco after her shyster husband’s financial empire collapses. Blanchett’s character is a tragicomic cross between Blanche Dubois from "A Streetcar Named Desire," a character she played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2009; the wife of Bernie Madoff; and yet another fluttery, neurotic chip off the Allen mold.
How much of Jasmine really is Blanche? I sat there waiting for Bobby Cannavale’s character to rip off this T-Shirt and ravage her. (He never does.) "Streetcar" was a while ago, there was never any discussion with Woody about that at all. Obviously, there are parallels in the set-up. Jasmine is a grand character and she’s deluded. Also, the fact that Jasmine has difficulty navigating the fine line between reality and fantasy, the world is too horrifying and her social shame, that’s something that she and Blanche share. But the way this story unfolds is very contemporary. It has the rhythm and tone of a Woody film. To try to overlay one character over the other would be futile.
Jasmine is so thin-skinned and emotionally porous; did you take the character home with you? My children were in town with me and they weren’t interested in meeting Jasmine at the dinner table. You have to shed one thing and move on. When the character is so well-drawn and her set of experiences is so entirely different form your own, the leap is easier. Still, there is a certain feeling and texture that overhangs. I love San Francisco as a city, but I was psychologically ready to go to New York for happier days.

RELATED: ‘Blue Jasmine’ Premiere

There’s already Oscar buzz for your performance: do you take that in stride? Oscar? That’s nice but there are a lot of movies coming out. My focus has been the production of "The Maids" in Australia. Not long after I talk to you I’m going to get in my pajamas and see my children.
You have three sons with your husband, the playwright and director Andrew Upton. Do you try to shelter your children from your career, or immerse them in your world? We don’t quarantine them from what we do. Andrew and I run a theater company. They’re backstage. It’s a fun place, full of play and adventure. They also see the hard work that goes into the production department and see the commitment. They watch the set being bumped in. They see the hard work behind the outward glitz of it all. They don’t see just the product, they see the process. I think that’s interesting and they enjoy it.

Did that carry over to the set of "Blue Jasmine?"

You look at all of Woody’s films: there’s a chemistry about the ensemble. The kids see it’s never just one person. Everybody has to be on, including the cinematographer and the focus puller. It’s a communal focus.

Even though it’s an ensemble, this is a movie, like "Annie Hall," with a woman’s name in the title. It revolves around your character and her complexities. Jasmine’s like so many women who’ve fallen from grace. Hopefully I’ve presented her warts and all. Hopefully, in the end, her naiveté and how deluded she is humanizes her. There’s no malice, there’s just an incredible amount of pain, damage and delusion. Still, it’s not all heavy. Just look at the sister’s names: Ginger and Jasmine sound like a Thai restaurant.

Q&A: Never “Enough Said”: More Talk on Motherhood and Career with Julia Louis-Dreyfus

September 21, 2013 By Thelma Leave a Comment

In vino veritas

This dialog with Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a continuation of an interview conducted at the Toronto Film Festival for Yahoo! Movies. Julia and I (and director Nicole Holofcener) are of the same generation: working mothers who went to college, had kids and are now, gradually, facing empty nests and, eek, what we see looking forward — and looking back — at midlife.

Here, I continue that part of the interview that was a little more personal, and more about mothers and professional women from our generation. Julia and I were discussing her character, Eva, who is having an awkward summer with her daughter as the pair prepares to separate when Ellen (Tracey Fairaway) heads to Sarah Lawrence in the fall. I said to Julia, about her character, “and she’s afraid…”

LOUIS-DREYFUS: She’s terrified.

Q: Nicole, the writer-director, is also someone who has gone through this transition or will be going through this. Her children are younger, right?

LOUIS-DREYFUS: Her twins are a year younger than my youngest. But still, she thinks about it a lot. And it’s very much on her mind, when her boys go off. And, what that means, and —

Q: Do you think that there’s now this generational shift? That our generation of women, who are writers and actresses and directors, who had kids, are at that point, where their kids are leaving, and are now going to re-embrace their careers with new vigor? Do you think there’s going to be this “Enough Said” renaissance?

LOUIS-DREYFUS: Jesus Christ, I hope so. I mean, the more voices of smart, experienced, women out there, the better for the world, I say, really.

Q: I’m there and, also, you have to be aware — just my personal drum to beat — is that there are, in fact, there were never many female film critics to begin with, and there are in fact less. And a lot of them who are our age have been furloughed off, and are floating, without the seniority that say, a Judith Christ had, or a Pauline Kael. And, just so you know, you need those people out there. We need those experienced women in print and online out there. We have to put that into the conversation too, because the things that we enjoy, and that could be “Enough Said,” or it could be “The Kids Are Alright,” or even “Bridesmaids” and “The Heat.” Male critics have a different lens, and we don’t want them to be the only gate keeper.

LOUIS-DREYFUS: Right. How are we going to do this?

Q: I’m fighting every day, that’s all I can say. I’m telling you and I’m writing about it, and I’m writing in a mainstream place, and I just didn’t — I’m not angry. I just write about you. I just wrote about Nicole. I write about the movies that interest me, and make sure that they are getting sung. And the movies of Catherine Keener; and you’ve done great work because you’re also doing “Veep” on HBO.

LOUIS-DREYFUS: Yep. Thank you very much.

Q: My all-time favorite TV show is Armando Iannucci’s “The thick of It.” And “Veep” is that show’s American cousin.

LOUIS-DREYFUS : “The Thick of It:” Amazing.

Q: Amazing. So, what do you think about the path for women are age. You’ve had success moving from TV to movies and back, but there’s a lot of resistance. I’m sure it’s hard.

LOUIS-DREYFUS : These scripts aren’t bountiful. You can’t just pluck them off trees. And that’s why I jumped when I read “Enough Said,” because it was like, holy shit, there’s nothing like this out there. I’ve got to do this. And, oh God, I’m so happy I did.

Was it good for you, too? Gandolfini, left, Louis-Dreyfus

Q: Obviously, you’re looking for more. What’s your next project?

LOUIS-DREYFUS: My next thing? I’m leaving today to go shoot “Veep: Season 3.” So I’m in the thick of that. That’s what I’m laser focused on, at the minute, and also trying to develop something else for film. But I’ve got to keep my eyes on the prize of “Veep” right now. It’s a very demanding schedule, and even juggling this, the film festival, this interview, the premiere, I’m in the middle of “Veep.”