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Snow White

by ELEANOR MORROW

Bad Moms
dir. Jon Lucas & Scott Moore
100 minutes

Amy Mitchell (Mila Kunis) finds her husband (David Walton) cheating on her with an Ukranian camgirl. They masturbate together because his wife is really busy, even though she only works part time since her two children, Jane and Dylan, have zero in the way of friends or hobbies. No Jewish woman has ever named her children Jane and Dylan, but society has forced Mila Kunis to renounce her faith and become a gentile version of herself.

After she decides to be a "Bad Mom," Kunis' choices involve: reading the newspaper, going to the movies, and eating before paying in the supermarket. She talks to her friends Kiki (Kristen Bell) and Carla (Kathryn Hahn) about how they are kind of mystified by what uncircumsized penises required. In every significant way, these are women who have never made any emotional choices since they were teenagers.

This is what men imagine women are like: they have no internal agency beyond reappropriating montage sequences from The Hangover where they get wasted and forget about what are ostensibly the most important people in their entire life, their children.

Yet a certain amount of dissatisfaction with the world they live in is probably appropriate. There is one person of color in Bad Moms, and she is Jada Pinkett Smith. Actually, Mila Kunis' couples counselor is played by Wanda Sykes, who is forced to wear a gigantic afro for some reason, and the principal of the school is Wendell Pierce for what can charitably be referred to as a Holy Trinity of tokenism.

In the promotional material for Bad Moms, Jada Pinkett Smith was awarded the title "Judgy Mom," I guess because she has short hair. By the end of Bad Moms, the chief antagonist Gwendolyn (Christina Applegate) takes all of her former enemies on her husband's private jet, but Jada Pinkett Smith does not even get to go along — presumably because she is too judgy. At the prospect of flying on a tiny black plane that looks perilously unsafe, the women get incredibly giddy, like they have never been more than a few feet above the ground.

After she finds out that her husband has been cheating on her, Mila Kunis has basically no reaction. She sort of knocks over the computer monitor and kicks him out of the house. She never cries, or even tells her children what happened. She tells her friends, but explains that things had not been great for awhile and that there was not a lot of sex. What was the excuse for this? She works at a coffee start-up.

Maybe Bad Moms just exists to brainwash women into thinking going to the movies and paying $12 for a ticket to these inspirational, regressive messages created by men is the way to exorcise their basic unhappiness. I recently read the memoir I'm Not Okay: Turning Heartbreak Into Happily Never After by Andi Dorfman which has made me consider these issues more deeply. It was truly disturbing how much Andi's reaction to men was shaped by the other men in her life, whether it be her father's appraisal of her potential partners or just others guys she had dated in her life.

I'm Not Okay: Turning Heartbreak Into Happily Never After has a lot more to say about what makes women happy than Bad Moms. There's this moment where Andi gets really upset with this guy she is about to sleep with because he asks her whether she wants to "make love" or "fuck." She responds, "Umm...make love," and the whole thing goes south from there. Later, she sees his apartment and it is in no way as great as she described, and she realizes she does not want to fuck him any longer. I was truly in awe that someone would ever admit to being this superficial.

My point is that even the most banal story told by an actual woman holds about 1000x more weight than anything in Bad Moms. Just the choice to cast Kristen Bell as a shrinking wallflower who is forced by her husband to have sex with every Friday is handled with an astonishing lack of grace. I mean, it was not okay to casually include a rape subplot in this suburban comedy.

Dressing Kristen Bell up in unattractive clothing that she would never wear feels so fake. Even though Mila Kunis is a mother now, we never really see her as one in Bad Moms. The way she talks to her kids as if they were these precocious little balls of happiness she has to coax forwards is so completely unbelievable that she instantly loses all credibility as a mother.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording.