How Cinematic Motherhood Reflects Our Moment

The final lines of The Little Foxes, William Wyler’s 1941 adaptation of the Lillian Hellman play, are reserved for Alexandra (Teresa Wright), Regina’s (Bette Davis) naïve daughter who floats through scenes, unmoored by any currents of familial tension. In these final moments, Alexandra is reeling from her mother’s wily misdeeds, gazing up at her openly, while Regina stands atop the stairs, peering over the banister, chilled by her family’s sudden absence. In her response to her mother’s question—“Would you like to sleep in my room tonight?”—Alexandra asks, “Why Mama? Are you afraid?” It is delivered with her characteristic innocence, but carries the kind of heft which sits tangibly in the expanding space between them. In this moment, the mother-daughter dynamic is sharply recentered; the camera zooms in until we see the stark, grimy details of this relationship. For Regina and Alexandra, this bond is necessary to their survival, as both women were born in the early 19th century when their financial survival was reliant on men, but it is also burdened with jealousy, shifting in relation to their proximity to men.

Wyler draws The Little Foxes to a close by holding his camera on Regina watching her daughter run away with David Hewitt (Richard Carlson) into the rainy night. She fades into a retreating shadow, blurred by the window. Such physical obstruction emphasizes the distance which governs these two–windows function to service observance, rather than communication. Regina watches her daughter retreat with a blend of regret and disdain, fostered by an environment that inevitably forced Alexandra to resort to desperate measures. The window filters the unreciprocated longing and desire from mother to daughter into something ominously tragic.

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While Stella Dallas came out four years prior to The Little Foxes, it takes place in the immediate aftermath of World War I. The film tracks the upwards mobility of Stella (Barbara Stanwyck) as she purposefully moves through the world, determined to create an easier life for herself and her daughter Laurel (Anne Shirley). In the end, in order to secure a lucrative marriage for Laurel, she sacrifices their relationship. Instead of attending the wedding, she watches her get married from the bustling street, steadying her gaze as the light streaming through the window, catching her tears as they glisten dramatically. The camera remains staunchly situated alongside Stella, framing the silent, pristine ceremony through her overwhelming emotion.

Ultimately, whether a mother is positioned as a villain or a hero is incidental; she will remain isolated in the totality of her failure, her daughter offered up to a world of men. Over the years, films focused on this facet of motherhood have been united in treating these maternal ebbs and flows as worthy of the melodramatic spotlight. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is the newest iteration of such a trend, the gradual heartbreak which defines mothers and daughters lending the light-hearted coming-of-age-story heft.

While female friendship has typically risked being dismissed as slight, the mother-daughter dynamic has long been staged as a compelling relational battleground. Cinematic renderings of mother and daughter are defined by similar needs and issues; in almost every iteration of this story, mothers are confronted by a jealousy over the freedom and access their daughter is granted. In almost every iteration, both parties are drawn into moments of claustrophobic conflict that feel inescapable, wrapping around the women at hand and stretching back into generations past. Yet with every passing year, Hollywood grows more adept at offering these women hopeful conclusions.

Channing Godfrey Peoples made the implicit competition for approval in female circles explicit in her 2020 drama Miss Juneteenth. Turquoise (Nicole Beharie) is a single mother who wants her daughter Kai (Alexis Chikaeze) to win the local Miss Juneteenth pageant. In this way the history, pressure and exhaustion often crowding teenage girls and the women who raise them is laid bare.

Miss Juneteenth embodies the financial constraints which propel these women into negotiating their needs from one another. Turquoise channels Stella’s all-encompassing desire to offer her daughter a life of opportunities at her own expense. The extra hours she works sit uncomfortably on her shoulders, slumping her body forward. The tulle of Kai’s pageant gown feels light and indulgent, so texturally distinct from the cotton shirts that soak up the Texan sun. Peoples uses these details to forego explicit melodrama and offer a story that feels equally meaningful in its construction. In the end, Kai and Turquoise sit outside, and they seem to have reached an easy place in their relationship despite Kai failing to place in the pageant. Considering the film’s modern setting, these women are better equipped to see the ways in which their lives transcend any domestic status, but their equilibrium is hard earned—secured after expressing their wants and desires, achieved in vulnerability.

Each of these partnerships chart the space where one person ends and another begins in a domestic setting. Each of them can be summarized in Julia Jacklin’s song “Less of a Stranger,” buried towards the end of her 2022 album PRE PLEASURE, where she takes a stark inventory of the anger passed between herself and her mother. In the bridge, she sings: “Sometimes I wonder, do I intimidate her? Do my questions and my pain take like skin to the razor?” It is a simple, generous extension which unknots the complexities of such intimate love. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is just the latest in an endless trail of films which attempt to answer such questions—each offering a more hopeful interpretation than the last.

London-based film writer Anna McKibbin loves digging into classic film stars and movie musicals. Find her on Twitter to see what she is currently obsessed with.