Commentary : From a Producer’s View

In Mimi Avin’s commentary last Sunday (“Selling Out for the Sake of Expediency,” Nov. 20), she wrote that “The Good Mother” was so mean-minded and morally contemptuous a movie, with so ugly a point of view, that she was not obligated to respect its privacy and therefore, found it justifiable to reveal the ending. Dismissively noting that the movie was well made, she went on to a vitriolic assassination of the film on moral rather than aesthetic grounds.

In 1985, I purchased the film rights to Sue Miller’s first novel, “The Good Mother,” then an unpublished manuscript. I was deeply moved by the story and felt outrage at the prejudices still existing towards women. Many of us who have had our perception extended by the women’s movement in general and our wives in particular have tended to regard the battle won, but “The Good Mother” stunningly made clear the fact that the battle is only midway. This was a major motivation for the film project.

“Most movies show you something and tell you how to feel about it,” Avins wrote, “but I’m afraid we’re supposed to feel superior, smug in the knowledge that we would never be such careless parents.”

We, the film makers (Michael Bortman, Leonard Nimoy, Diane Keaton and I) spent a great deal of time considering the presentation of the characters and deliberately concluded that we would not manipulate the feelings of the public by presenting certain characters as conventional heroes and others as villains.

Anna is portrayed by Keaton as a loving mother who has lived a life of silent repression and whose subsequent relationship with a sculptor brings about her sexual awakening and brief period of self-fulfillment.

In helping Anna evolve into a more complete person, her lover Leo becomes integral to the establishment of a new family unit. His love for Anna and Anna’s daughter Molly and the intimacy they share leads to a misjudgment that contributes to Anna’s loss of custody in a lawsuit brought about by Brian, Anna’s ex-husband.

Brian is justifiably outraged when, on a visit, his 5-year-old daughter asks to see his penis. When he refuses, she says, “Leo lets me see it--he lets me touch it.” Brian then takes the action most responsible parents would take towards custody of the child.

Avins admonishes Anna’s inability to defend herself and judges the fact that she sells out her lover in her testimony at the trial, as morally corrupt. But Anna is terrified at the thought of losing Molly and, after a brief argument with her lawyer, agrees not to “instruct the judge on moral issues.”

She takes her lawyer’s advice and tries to absolve herself of completely responsibility by blaming Leo. This is a desperate moment which begets desperate actions. Anna has only known Leo for three months, and, although he has helped her to fulfill herself sexually, can there be even the slightest consideration of a choice between Leo’s role in Anna’s life and that of her daughter Molly? Anna has extended her self-awareness through Leo, but can we believe that she has been irreversibly transformed into another person? As a result, she naturally reverts to her more timid persona at this moment of crisis.

The movie’s message is not, as Avins states, that Anna is a bad mother--that because she has sex and enjoys it she is punished. It is rather about the inability of society to accept women as both mothers and lovers. In the film, these two identities coalesce when, as a result of a bad dream, Molly gets into bed with Anna and Leo, interrupting their lovemaking. But, after she falls asleep in their bed, Anna and Leo continue to make love. This, finally, is the tragic mistake that costs Anna custody of Molly and regrettably society’s outrageous and unjust condemnation of Anna’s sexuality.

I believe this mistake is as costly and tragic as the mother who looks away for the instant that her child meets with a terrible accident.

Avins says the definition of obscenity is sexual material without redeeming social value and suggests that “The Good Mother” follows the paths of pornographic books by ruining its lusty women. In the short prologue, we understand the historical mechanisms that influence Anna’s choices. She is attracted to her free-spirited, unconventional aunt, Babe, who gets pregnant, is alcoholic and ultimately drowns, but Anna does not suffer the same consequences.

This same attraction to bohemian Babe is subsequently directed towards Leo, but at the core is the flaw that Anna desperately wants to be somebody else--”some wilder more passionate person.” To some degree, we all suffer from this affinity to transference. In its most harmless incarnation, we go to the movies to identify with the characters. But Anna’s self-esteem is so low that she can’t see the value in being a piano teacher because family expectations were for her to become a concert pianist. None of this is a judgment against strong women, but, is a device to convey information in order to better understand the psychology of the central character.

“Perhaps it is a testament to the dramatic power of ‘The Good Mother’ that it engendered such outrage in me,” Avins writes. Outrage against the system is a basic position of “The Good Mother” and Avins’ response is precisely what we hoped to evoke. Although Avins would like to have seen Anna get Molly back, it doesn’t necessarily work that way in real life.

In closing, Avins writes, “At a time when the American public has heard “old-fashioned American values” touted ad nauseum by political candidates, its judgment is an example of repression run amok in the name of values. The court is wrong to take Molly away from her mother. In not saying so, the movie is in complicity with a dangerous, offensive misogyny.”

This film is not misogynistic as it speaks up for Anna. The voice of reason in the courtroom is heard when the psychiatrist testifies that taking Molly away from Anna would put her at risk. Anna speaks up for herself eloquently when she tells the psychiatrist that she made mistakes but that she doesn’t want to lose Molly. “The Good Mother” is not in complicity with offensive political cliches, its every frame is critical of them.

Consider “The Good Mother” as a metaphor for the promises of the ‘60s (personal freedom and sexual fulfillment) being unrealizable in the repressive conservatism of the Reagan ‘80s. When Anna is ready to claim that legacy, the tragic reality is that the sociological pendulum has swung back in denial of the possibility.