“Mother’s Day” features several laugh-out-loud moments but also contains strong content, including language. Jennifer Aniston plays Sandy, a woman who gets a big surprise when she learns her ex-husband, the father of their two sons, has just remarried a woman quite a bit younger than him. The adjustments they all go through are not easy. The plot is also about a widower named Bradley (Jason Sudeikis) and the difficult task he has in raising two daughters. He wants to treat the upcoming Mother’s Day as just another day, but the girls want to honor their mom’s memory. Their mother was an ex-marine who has been gone just a year. Bradley still misses his wife and plays old videos and thinks of her often, but being a single parent isn’t easy. One of his daughters tells Bradley, “Mom was never late for soccer practice.” Finally, two other plots in the film revolve around Sandy’s friend, Jesse (Kate Hudson), who is not speaking to her parents, due to the fact that her mother was against her dating a man from India. What her mother doesn’t know is that she also married him and had a child, too. Britt Robertson plays a young woman named Kristin, a new mother, who keeps turning down her boyfriend’s marriage proposal for a certain reason: She’s afraid of getting a divorce. Julia Roberts plays a Home Shopping Network host and that figures into the plot, too, specifically regarding Kristin.
Some of the issues the characters confront in the movie include a mother learning her daughter has a lesbian partner and another woman adjusting to her two boys having a new stepmother. The humor is tame, at times, such as when Sandy gets her arm caught in a vending machine when the candy she bought gets stuck. Some of the humor is more suggestive, such as when a boy puts his lion suit on backward for a school play, and the tail is no longer in the back but in the front. At any rate, despite some nice moments and the daughters in the film working things out with their mothers and, in one case, their father, the content is strong and prevents us from awarding the movie our Dove “Family-Approved” Seal. We encourage parents to check out the content listing.
