Imagine Watching “Mr. Mom” In Reverse …
Posted on 25. Aug, 2010 by Brian Reid in Uncategorized
… and you’d get something similar to what is apparently one of next Julie Roberts vehicles. Last month came the news that the guy behind Glee is at work on a romantic comedy that goes down like this:
In the romantic comedy, Julia will play a working woman married to a stay-at-home husband. She loses her job, their roles are reversed, and she has to adjust to motherhood.
I honestly have no idea how this works as a concept. I’ve long argued that the reason that fish-out-of-water plotlines about dads suddenly thrust into a caregiver role have gotten more and more stale since “Mr. Mom” came out in 1983 is because clueless dads are less and less plausible in an era where at-home dads are being called ho-hum part of the social fabric.
So as cool as a reverse “Mr. Mom” is on some level, I’m not sure a movie about a clueless mom is going to work all that well. In fact, it begs for a first act in which Julia is set up as a completely out-of-touch working mom, which is not a stereotype I’m a big fan of, either.
But if this moves forward, it should prompt some interesting social commentary. This will be well worth tracking.
daddy in a strange land
25. Aug, 2010
Hmmm… I wonder if the dad’s transition to the outside-the-home workplace will be explored at all. Did you see the episode of Modern Family where Mitchell quits his job as a lawyer and so Cam has to go back to work and Mitchell stays home with Lily, but both of them hate the switch but don’t say anything because each one thinks that the other one deserves a different experience?
BloggerFather
25. Aug, 2010
There are mothers out there who have absolutely no motherly intuition, and the idea of them being forced to stay home with the kids could be interesting. I don’t have a problem with portraying clueless moms or dads because, you know, they’re out there. The offense of Mr. Mom wasn’t so much in how poorly he did. After all, by the end of the movie he was an expert at parenting. The offense comes at the very end, when everyone returns to their natural, God-assigned roles.