Moderately Charming Night Out a Faith-Based Surprise
Allyson (Sarah Drew) needs a night to herself. While her marriage with successful architect Sean (Sean Astin) is a good one, the pressures of motherhood have been stressing her out more than normal of late. She’s longing for a night of adult conversation, meals not prepared in a microwave, feminine dresses and sparkly high heels, and if she doesn’t get one soon, the young mother might just end up having a nervous breakdown.
PHOTO: Sony
Allyson gets her wish. Sean will watch the kids for the night while she spends an evening on the town with her best friends from church, fellow moms Sondra (Patricia Heaton) and Izzy (Andrea Logan White). But things fall off the rails right from the start, dinner reservations made incorrectly and worry about whether or not their husbands are up to the task of taking care of the children weighing on all of them. Yet it isn’t until the trio run into Allyson’s sister-in-law Bridget (Abbie Cobb), herself a single mom, that things truly fall to pieces, the discovery that her baby’s father has carelessly left their kid in untrustworthy hands sending four all of them on a mad quest to remedy the situation.
Moms’ Night Out is the latest in a long string of faith-based productions to hit the local multiplex. Just this year we’ve seen the more blatantly Christian fundamentalist Son of God, God’s Not Dead and Heaven is for Real make major box office dollars. Heck, even Noah, not without controversy over whether or not it was ‘Biblically accurate’ (whatever the heck that’s supposed to mean), has managed to make major hay as far as ticket sales go, the Darren Aronofsky-directed effort making over $330-million worldwide.
Taking Noah out of the discussion, as financially successful as the titles on the rest of that list might be that doesn’t make any of them particularly good. Each beats the viewer over the head with their didactic points of view, not allowing for anything close to a dissenting opinion, looking at things like debate and discussion as facets to be avoided as if they were the plague. They are annoyingly judgmental, having precious little to do with “Faith” and instead remain perfectly content to preach to the converted leaving everyone else to wonder what the fuss is about.
Funny thing, while Moms’ Night Out doesn’t follow a different game plan or come up with a new way to get its points across, it still somehow, someway, manages to produce smiles, earn a couple of gentle tears and even generate a fair bit of laughter. Because it refuses to take things deathly seriously, because it allows for flaws, foibles, missteps and mistakes to be a part of the always ephemeral (and almost certainly ubiquitous) “God’s Plan,” gosh darn it all if the movie doesn’t have its own gentle, winsomely distracting charms. While not a film I’m going to be talking about much in the future (let alone remembering in any sort of detail) I admit to having had a passably decent enough time watching it.
Do not misunderstand me, this thing is really nothing more than an extended sitcom (not a surprise considering former “Everybody Loves Raymond” star Heaton is listed as a producer), brothers Jon and Andrew Erwin (October Baby) directing with a perfunctory exactitude that’s hardly subtle. As for the script written by Jon Erwin and Andrea Gyertson Nasfell (Escape) it is a model of “Modern Family” meets “Full House” meets “Growing Pains” simplicity, any connection to real life parental problems more accidental than they are intelligently planned.
PHOTO: Sony
But unlike most films cut from a somewhat similar fundamentalist cloth, there is little that’s preachy or overbearing about this comedy, the filmmakers and the cast treating these travails as casually and as naturally as they can for the majority of the running time. Allyson’s tribulations are at least recognizable whether a viewer is a parent or not, and while many of the husband-wife interactions feel more of the “Leave It To Beaver” generation than they do the Facebook and Instagram one, for some gosh darn reason that doesn’t make Allyson and Sean’s relationship less charming. More, when the movie does decide to preach, it does so in a rather surprising ways, a quiet moment between a frazzled mother and a tough-as-nails biker (nicely underplayed by country music superstar Trace Adkins) containing droplets of truth that are deftly intermixed inside the moderately didactic sermonizing.
Say what you will about the picture’s point-of-view and fundamentalist opinions, neither of which I have the heart or desire to defend, bash or argue about, it still goes without saying I’d have a much higher tolerance for this sort of faith-based stuff if it was presented with intelligent reason or sympathetic subtlety. I still wouldn’t agree with much of the subtext or thinly veiled politics not-so-cleverly hiding within the narrative’s layers, but I’d be far less annoyed by them if it didn’t feel like the filmmakers were beating me over the head with a sledgehammer while they were attempting to make any of these right-wing religious talking points. Still, Moms’ Night Out is a family-friendly sitcom masquerading as a feature film with more laughs than expected and enough heart to make the majority of the odious aspects borderline tolerable. If those obnoxious (and slightly noxious) elements are taken with a grain of salt it’s not too bad, and while not the greatest of recommendations, considering the alternative it’s going to have to do.
– Review reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle
Film Rating: 2½ (out of 4)
