4.5/5
Albert Brooks’s Mother begins by making you think you’re watching the story of a middle-aged writer learning to cope with his overbearing mother, but by the time of the movie ends, Brooks has so quietly and subtly shifted our perspective that we barely realize until the credits roll we’ve been meant to identify with the mother all along. It’s an incredible magic trick of narrative storytelling and a stroke of genius that subverts our expectations for these male, mid-life crisis comedies and turns so many of the genres sexist tropes on their head. As is so often the case, Brooks allows himself to play a character who thinks he’s the smartest and most self-enlightened person in the room – but by the end we see just how shallow, selfish, and deluded he really is. It’s a delightful comedy that, like so much of Brooks’s work, has much more going on than its surface would lead you to believe.
