Early on in "Stepmom," Julia Roberts' character tries to buy her boyfriend's children off by giving them a puppy. It's a cheap trick designed to win the kids' affection without making any real emotional connection, hoping the novelty will hold.
"Stepmom" the movie does the same thing -- it tries to buy the audience off with puppies. Everything, from beginning to end, is engineered solely to manipulate the audience's emotions, without ever creating any real connection. It is filled with cute kids, falling kids, lost kids, job losses, Christmas, a sappy John Williams score and even cancer.
Yet, for a while, it actually works. Most of the credit should go to Susan Sarandon, who plays Jackie, the divorced mother of the two kids Roberts must become stepmom to, and gives a performance that is initially so quietly vindictive it belongs in a film with more bite.
Just as her ex-husband (Ed Harris) has made their child-rearing arrangements even more awkward by having his girlfriend (Roberts) move in with him, Jackie gets diagnosed with cancer. Now she must learn to accept the woman who shares her children's life. But she does not make it very easy.
Sarandon plays the perfect mother who knows her children's schedules by heart and always knows the right thing to say. Roberts is an ambitious photographer in the New York advertising world who has little interest in raising children, let alone any knowledge of how to do it. Sarandon relentlessly digs into Roberts' faults, nearly reducing her to tears on a few occasions.
It doesn't help that the kids, the bratty type that only appear in movies, initially hate Roberts as well. There is the 12-year-old Anna (Jena Malone), who picks up on her mother's vindictiveness toward this new woman; and Ben (Liam Aiken, so irrepressibly cute he has to be the demon offspring of Macaulay Culkin and that little girl with a lisp from "Mrs. Doubtfire"), who is too young to care all that much, but makes a fuss nonetheless.
The kids, of course, soon learn to like Roberts' character. But few would have guessed that all it would take is a sing-along during the car ride home to win them over. After that all three are best friends. It is to the film's credit that Roberts continues to talk matter-of-factly to the kids as if they were her clients throughout, never really grabbing hold of how to parent.
As Sarandon's sickness becomes more serious, she has to rely more and more on the future stepmom to help mother the kids.
But even as they become good friends, which plays extremely awkwardly, Sarandon still continues the vicious jibes, such as when she steals Roberts' idea of taking Anna to a Pearl Jam concert.
The dynamics of this two-way mothering relationship is explored in a few more over-done scenes. Ben is lost, Ben falls, Anna breaks up with a boyfriend and Roberts risks her jobs for the kids.
The director, Chris Columbus, is no stranger to overdoing the emotional side of a story to the point of exhaustion.
He is responsible for the first two "Home Alone" films and "Mrs. Doubtfire," which were well done farces capable of remaining entertaining over the sappy periods, although bogged down in the end.
"Stepmom" is not a comedy, although there are some funny sequences, such as when Roberts instructs Anna on how to tell her ex-boyfriend off.
But Columbus is ultimately left with his habit of beating every emotional dead horse -- Sarandon gets no less than four final speeches -- without anything to counter it.
Sarandon's searing performance could only carry the trite script so far, and Roberts could only pick up so much of the slack. In the end, the film grows over-directed, over-written and over-long.
There is good material in "Stepmom," it's a subject ripe for exploration. But it is disappointing to think that in this modern age of constantly evolving families and diverse parenting that the most important film about divorce still remains the two-decade-old "Kramer vs. Kramer."
Just one of that film's moments of quiet awkwardness speaks volumes more than all 124 bloated minutes of this film. In the end, "Stepmom" is the most manipulative movie of the year.
