STEPMOM 1998
45%
Directed by Chris Columbus
Written by Gigi Levangie, Jessie Nelson, Steven Rogers, Karen Leigh Hopkins, Ron Bass
Starring Julia Roberts, Susan Sarandon, Ed Harris, Jena Malone, Liam Aiken
Synopsis
Isabel is the eponymous stepmom, a young New York photographer adjusting to her new boyfriend’s two kids and the impossible standards set by his ex-wife, Jackie. When the family receives tragic news, the dynamic is thrown off, and new bonds start to form.
Why We Love It
Might Christmas Day 1998 have been the most maudlin date in American box office history? We’re willing to bet a sack full of toys that it was. It was the day, after all, that two of the 1990s’ most relentless tear-jerkers hit theaters, going head-to-head and sob-for-sob for the country’s movie moolah. Robin Williams’s (very Rotten) Patch Adams, about an overbearingly joyous Doctor-slash-Clown, would win the box office—despite Roger Ebert saying the “shameless” film “extracts tears individually by liposuction, without anesthesia”—and yet the weekend’s number-two film, Stepmom, is the one that remains the more fondly remembered.
We’re not crying just thinking about it, you are.
Chris Columbus’s film is in many ways a by-the-books schmaltz fest. It has a family fractured by divorce (Ed Harris and Susan Sarandon play the divorcees, Julia Roberts the new woman in his life). It has two adorable children struggling with that divorce (Liam Aitken and Jena Malone, excellent as a bratty teen who eventually comes around to her stepmom-to-be). It has one of those infectious scenes of people dancing around their house in their pajamas to a bouncy hit song (“Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”). And it has a midway cancer twist that’s aimed with ruthless precision at the tear ducts of any soul-carrying viewer in its path.
But Stepmom has something else going for it, too: a little more bite than critics perhaps gave it credit for at the time. That mostly comes down to Sarandon, who is wonderfully icy as Jackie in early scenes, eyeing Roberts’s career-focused Isabel with fierce territoriality even as she pretends to play nice. As the two come to bond, Sarandon loosens, but only a touch. During the film’s climax, if you can call it that, Jackie and Isabel have dinner, sharing their fears for the future (dying Jackie worries the kids will forget her; Isabel is sure she will never compare to their “real mom”).
Sarandon’s big Bette Davis–esque eyes convey a thousand things here and in the film’s final shot: kinship, hope, and love, yes, but something like envy lingers, too. As it would. She is sitting across from, and then next to, the woman who—likable and capable though she may be—will get to finish the life she started.