Lovely and Amazing

Sometimes, there are movies that you just don't want anyone else to see. Having someone else see it would be the same as sharing your diary or letting the lunch lady from your elementary school watch you take a bath. For me, Lovely & Amazing is one of those movies. Lovely & Amazing is about a white mother and two grown daughters. (One, who is played by Catherine Keener, is married with a child. The other, played by Emily Mortimer, is a single actress who routinely picks up stray dogs.) The mother also has a black, adopted daughter named Annie. She's about 10 years old. The mother goes in to have liposuction on her stomach. She's got a crush on her doctor. Oh my gosh...this IS a personal story to me. I mean, does everyone's mother fall in love with her doctor? For my own piece of mind, just answer me "yes." While the mother is in the hospital with the procedure, the older daughters go on with their lives and have to take care of Annie.

They're all in it together because they're sisters. And, as is the case in certain families, that is what they have; that is their family. The most moving parts of the movie deal with body image. Annie wants to tear her skin off to make it look white like her mom's. Annie's fat like her mom, and understands that her mom is having liposuction to look better. However, when your mom goes to such great lengths to change her appearance (an appearance that, in some respects, matches her daughter's), a 10 year old girl is not really emotionally equipped to come to terms with such a conclusion. I guess it follows that the actress-sister has the same sorts of body insecurities. Maybe it's because they were/are raised by the same mother. Maybe it's because they are women/girls in this American society. What alternative do they really have than to be unsatisfied with and insecure about their bodies?

Emily Mortimer's character has, possibly, the most honest and uncomfortable scene. She stands naked in front of a famous actor (played by Dermot Mulroney...Keener's real-life then-husband and now ex-husband) after she has sex with him. She tells him to tell her what is good and bad about her body. The critique that she requests (which he does give) is startling because Mortimer's character, although self-deprecating and kind of insecure, seems ultimately strong in herself. The critique represents a kind of truth women both want and don't want about their bodies. It's a vulnerability that seemingly self-assured women rarely display.

After, the actress walks away to rescue another dog. Only, this one bites her in the face. I think this daughter will ultimately be okay, though, because the next morning she wakes up to a house full of her sisters. They're waiting for the call from the hospital to finally pick their mother up. I get the feeling that maybe Mortimer's character--just for that moment--doesn't care that some one-night stand guy told her that her teeth were yellow or that her arms were flabby. See, in that moment, her family was together. And, that's what she has, mentally and physically, and for better or for worse.