JoyOfMovies.com: Movie Review of All About My Mother

"All About My Mother": pregnant nuns and other ironies
By Matthew Prins
Pedro Almodovar loves women. He particularly loves women actresses. He is also quite fond of men who are more than transvestites and less than transsexuals. (How men can fall into this category is a question likely best left unanswered.) That's great. I'm happy the famed Spanish director is enamored with the fairer sex. I like women, too. I even married one of them. But Almodovar's sonnet to women, "All About My Mother," suffers because his main goal -- to show virtually all women as fabulous emotional cherubs -- becomes diluted through his irony and obsession with the strange.
The coincidences begin early. "All About My Mother" starts with the eponymous mother, Manuela (Ceclia Roth), working as an actress in medical training videos portraying a distraught mother trying to decide whether or not to donate her dead son's organs. After acting in the video, Manuela takes her son to see a performance of "A Streetcar Named Desire," and afterward her son is run over. Manuela then becomes an actual distraught mother trying to decide whether or not to donate her dead son's organs (irony #1). She grieves. She goes to Barcelona to try to find her son's father; along the way, she befriends a nun (Penelope Cruz) who, unknown to Manuela at the time, is a pregnant nun (irony #2). Oh. And the father of the nun's future child is the same man who fathered Manuela's dead son (irony #3). And on and on.
And then we have the obsession with the strange, which manifests itself in the two male characters who are more than transvestites and less than transsexuals. Both of them are in quasi-lesbian relationships and one of them is the father of the children from irony #3 (mothered by Manuela and the nun). At the nun's funeral, the father finds out ironies #4-7: He had a son from Manuela. That son died. He had a son from the nun. The nun died.
All this implausibility might have worked if Almodovar was playing "All About My Mother" for camp. But he's not. Everything is played in a very naturalistic manner, and while this leads to some very powerful performances (particularly Roth's emotionally sound but grieving mother), it never quite coheres with the ironic undertones.
Almodovar is trying to make a point about the family structure in "All About My Mother": a person's family is more than just who her blood relatives are. Just like with his love of women, I'm not going to disagree with his point of view, but with his tiresome and heavy-handed method of proving his point by showing the strong relationships among the pregnant nun and the nun's mother (who incidentally forges Chagalls) and Manuela and men who are more than...you know. This culminates with the following words (subtitled from Espanol) on the screen, which is the film's last image before the closing credits: "To all actresses who have played actresses, to men who act and become women, to all the people who want to be mothers." Subtlety is not a strength in "All About My Mother," and I'm not so sure Almodovar cares.
I've seen two other Almodovar films, one of which -- "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" -- I found much more enjoyable than "All About My Mother." "Women on the Verge" was also a covert ode to womenkind, but it was less earnest and more frivolous than "All About My Mother" was. That frivolity is what Almodovar's films need: a lighter touch to highlight the ludicrous events that act as his foundations. In "All About My Mother," he forces the audience to love his characters through cloying candor, which leaves "All About My Mother" as little better than the secular equivalent of most Christian filmmaking: preachy, obvious, and designed to make its core audience pleased with itself. In tha case of "All About My Mother," it's just for celebration of diversity rather than for celebration of religious beliefs.