[yasr_overall_rating]
Maggie Cooper thinks it would be really cool if her son Lloyd were gay. So cool, in fact, that she outs him to his entire school.
A Helicopter Mom is so named because, like helicopters, she hovers over her children in every aspect of their life and such is the case with Maggie (Nia Vardalos) and her 17 year-old son Lloyd (Jason Dolley). They live in a nice suburb in Los Angeles and because they are a single-parent family, Maggie feels an incessant need to be in every aspect of Lloyd’s life, literally. At one point at the breakfast table, she asks him what he thinks about when he masturbates. And you thought Norman Bates had mommy issues. While out at the beach together one day, she tells Lloyd that she wants to spend as much time with him as possible because before she knows it, he’ll be off at college, meet a nice girl, get married and then start a family, leaving no time for mommie dearest.
He attempts to convince her that none of this will happen, trying not to hurt her feelings and very nonchalantly exclaims “Maybe I’ll turn out to be gay!” At this point, Maggie becomes obsessively convinced that he truly is gay. When she asks him he denies it but she thinks she knows otherwise. As Lloyd tries to get on with his life, with the end of high school fast approaching, as well as the school prom, Maggie intrudes in all facets of his life, even going so far as to set up a fake dating profile for him, exclaiming that he is gay, announcing it to his entire school. While his friends are all cool with ‘his’ decision, after all, it is 2015, he becomes more and more exasperated with her constant meddling and it’s at this point that Maggie brings in Lloyd’s father Max (Mark Boone Junior).
She convinces him that Lloyd is gay and asks him to have a man-to-man conversation where he proceeds to tell him that he’ll love him no matter what his lifestyle choices are. Lloyd tries to inform him that he doesn’t know what he wants, that he likes girls and that he also likes one boy but all of this is coming from a teen who has never even kissed another person. When the prom finally arrives, Lloyd asks Carrie (Skyler Samuels), a pretty classmate who likes him, if she would like to go with him and she responds with a very enthusiastic yes. While there, Maggie inevitably turns up and berates Carrie, telling her that she is confusing Lloyd’s conflicting emotions and it is here that he finally tells Maggie to butt out of his life once and for all.
By the time the credits began to roll over the closing of the movie, I found myself shaking my head in sheer disbelief. I know there are a lot of mothers out there who love their kids to the point of smothering them but the relationship between Maggie and Lloyd never once felt real. The fact that she sets up a gay profile for him and then announces it to his school without his knowledge or consent, was, I’m assuming, meant to be humorous but it had quite the opposite effect. In reality, if any mother did that to one of her children, I’m sure they would disown her and never speak to her again and to some, it could also be viewed as bullying and we all know that there are teens out there who have taken their own lives as a result of said bullying.
Maggie also decides to apply to a respected college on Lloyd’s behalf, again, without his knowledge and then informs him that scholarship is for LGBT students, therefore, he must convince the counselor from the institution during his interview, that he is indeed gay. On paper, I’m sure this script must have been hilarious to some but now that it is a feature film, there is no humor whatsoever, only humiliation and embarrassment to a young teenager from the one person in his life who is supposed to be protecting him from that kind of mistreatment. The film is so intent on placing labels on people, you’re either straight or you’re gay, that in its tunnel-visioned intention to get that point across, it completely fails on every other level.
In order to have a film that people can believe in, you need a cohesive narrative, accompanied by believable characters with legitimate character exposition but with so many inconceivable scenarios throughout the entire movie, we don’t have characters onscreen, we have caricatures and instead of a story line, we have an uncoordinated assemblage of scenes that look like they are trying to fit together but run out of steam due to sheer exhaustion.
In theaters April 24th
