Proper parenting?

First published in Column 8 on the 16^th March, 1994

I’m turning today’s column into a film review – since the film in question raises some interesting points.

The movie is Mrs Doubtfire. It concerns Daniel, an actor, the laid-back, somewhat irresponsible father of three, who precipitates a crisis in his household by over-celebrating his son’s birthday. His wife uses this event to insist on a divorce, with the result that Daniel lose virtually all contact with his children.

In the guise of a buxom lady, Mrs Doubtfire, he becomes ‘nanny’ to his own household. Until his cover is blown, first by two of his children, and later, at his wife’s birthday party, by everybody, he’s very successful in the disguise.

That’s a slim outline. Mrs Doubtfire is supposed to be a comedy, with antecedents in Charley’s Aunt, and a host of plays going back for centuries. The problem with Mrs Doubtfire is that it also wants to make a statement about modern family relationships. In doing so it goes off at an odd angle and leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

I don’t care what revisionist playwrights think, comedies should end satisfactorily – all round. This one resolves only one of its conflicts: Daniel’s desire to be with his children. He’s insisted throughout the film that he can’t live without them.

But the other conflict, between Daniel and his wife, is skewered off and left dangling, as though the producers thought they might have a sequel on their hands.

As Mrs Doubtfire, Daniel’s in the unique position of learning directly from his wife the good things she thinks about him but has never said. He’s also able to get his own view across – without heat – particularly in relation to a man from the past who turns up to complicate the wife’s life.

Yet at the end, nothing comes of this knowledge. To all intents and purposes, Daniel, allowed to be himself again, reverts to being a child with his children, and the wife/mother carries on pursuing her career till seven each night. For the audience, a real downlift (the filmic equivalent of downmanaging).

The problem with the marriage relationship, initially, is that Daniel hasn’t grown up and become an adult; he wants to remain a child.[see below] Yet as Mrs Doubtfire, he’s transformed into a parent who maintains discipline and insists his children do their homework. He’s a counsellor to his wife, and he keeps house in the best female-Jeeves style.

Why then is he not allowed to grow up into adulthood once his disguise is removed? He obviously has it in him. Why all the ironic woman-to-woman discussions if he’s only to be sent back to play with the kids?

I think the moviemakers got it wrong. Almost at the end of the film, Mrs Doubtfire (who has now found her niche on syndicated children’s television), spouts forth some blather about there being ‘all sorts of families.’

‘As long as there is love,’ she proclaims, ‘it doesn’t matter how the families live, whether they be split up or together, with children fostered, or scattered to the four winds.’

A cop-out. The relationship between adults in a family counts for far more than the filmmakers want to admit. Years ago, in a film called The Sundowners, a teenage son tried to get his mother to say she loved him more than she loved her husband. Her answer was unequivocal, and Mrs Doubtfire would have been better to have heeded it.

The woman said she’d made a vow to love her husband. Love for children, she said, has its limited time – children grow up, leave the nest, and learn love for themselves. But the love between husband and wife grows, strengthens, and prevails.

Photo courtesy of IMDB.com

It’s interesting that only two years before Mrs Doubtfire, Robin Williams played Peter Pan in Hook. That character grew up; I wonder why Daniel couldn’t?

About six years after I wrote this column I read the book Mrs Doubtfire was based on. It’s called Madame Doubtfire, and is by Anne Fine. My succinct review of it was: Superior to the movie in every respect. Wittier, and more honest about the difficulties the family faces. Something, unfortunately, got lost in the translation to the big screen.