Mother's Day

The Holiday That Forgot to Arrive

There’s a moment in Mother’s Day where Jennifer Aniston’s character, Sandy, stands in her kitchen, staring at a Mother’s Day card her young son has made. The camera lingers just long enough to let us see the exhaustion in her eyes—the way her smile doesn’t quite reach them. It’s a small beat, easy to miss in a film that otherwise moves at the brisk, mechanical pace of a holiday special.

But it’s the closest Mother’s Day ever gets to feeling like something real. The rest of the movie, for all its star power and good intentions, plays like a greeting card that forgot to write itself.

Garry Marshall’s final film (he died just months after its release) is the third in his unofficial trilogy of holiday-themed ensemble romps, following Valentine’s Day (2010) and New Year’s Eve (2011). Like its predecessors, it’s a film built on the promise of interconnected stories, a sprawling cast, and the warm glow of sentimentality. But where Valentine’s Day at least had the decency to be shamelessly fun—a glittery, chaotic mess that knew exactly what it was—Mother’s Day often feels like it’s trying to force emotion where none exists.

The holiday itself is little more than a narrative convenience, a flimsy excuse to corral these characters into the same Atlanta suburb for a series of vignettes that rarely feel like they belong in the same movie.

The film’s structure is pure Marshall: a dozen or so storylines crisscrossing in the days leading up to the titular holiday, each one a variation on the theme of maternal love, loss, or longing. There’s Julia Roberts as Miranda, a successful businesswoman who abandoned her children years ago and is now trying to reconnect; Kate Hudson as Jesse, a free-spirited mom navigating a strained relationship with her conservative parents; Jason Sudeikis as Bradley, a grieving widower raising two daughters alone; and Aniston’s Sandy, a single mother whose ex-husband (Timothy Olyphant) has just remarried a much younger woman (Shay Mitchell).

The problem isn’t the premise—it’s the execution. These characters are sketches, not people, and their stories feel like they’ve been lifted from a Hallmark Channel pitch meeting. The dialogue is littered with clichés ("You can’t run from your past forever," "Family isn’t just blood, it’s love"), and the emotional beats are telegraphed so far in advance that you can set your watch by them.

Take the subplot involving Jesse and her parents, played by Margo Martindale and Jack Whitehall. Jesse’s mother is horrified to learn that her daughter has married a Black man (Aasif Mandvi) and had a biracial child, a revelation that plays out like a very special episode of a 1990s sitcom. The film treats this as a serious conflict, but the resolution is so tidy, so devoid of actual tension, that it feels less like drama and more like a public service announcement.