From The Trenches: Lessons from My Mother

When I think about my movie heritage, I mostly think about my Dad. It's from him that I've inherited most of my tastes and influences, and it's with him I share my opinions and information. My Mum and I share a lot of other interests, but she was never obsessive about music, movies and TV - she has very little recall of movie titles or plots or actors' and actresses' names. That's not to say she doesn't like movies, she does, but sometimes you don't need to know the production backstory or the last time the two lead actors played opposite each other or the box office revenue. Sometimes you just want to watch a movie.

The movies my Mum likes to watch fall pretty solidly in the weepie category. That, we don't share. I've made a list of movies I will never see, mostly because I know they'll be too sad and harrowing (these tend to be Holocaust movies or films about child abuse). Since I was a kid, though, I've scoured my movie magazines for something Mum would like. She has the 8-year-old me to thank for recommending the Michael Keaton sobfest My Life, for example, and we both lost it while watching Ponette, one of the most gut-wrenchingly sad movies I've ever seen.

I've never understood the draw of a movie that's guaranteed to make you cry - it's not fun and it's not pretty, so why bother? At the risk of sounding sappy, I think it's because of my Mum's good-heartedness and empathy. She likes to watch these movies because they remind her both of her own good fortune and the chance she has to help those less fortunate. My parents are foster parents, and I have one adopted sister and an almost-adopted brother. I think the weepie movies remind my Mum that there are always people in the world worse off than she is, and she'll do all she can to fix that.

But she also loves to laugh. One of the best times we all had together was when her parents came to visit, and we went to see Rush Hour. None of us expected much, but the movie was amazing. I think it had a lot to do with my Mum and grandparents. All three of them had big, loud, infectious laughs, and laughing with them made everything a hundred times funnier. I'm not sure that I've inherited that laugh, but Mum has passed down one thing: a love of watching people fall down. Kind of at odds with that fabled empathy, I know, but she always insists it's only funny if no one gets hurt. As a much-repeated family story goes, when I was very young, she, my sister and I got on a crowded bus. As she was getting seated with my sister, I waited in the aisle (I was maybe 3 at this point, I guess). Suddenly, the bus started moving, and I fell. My mother was laughing so hard, she couldn't even muster the energy to pick me up. Hilarious.

But really, it is hilarious, as long as it happens to someone else. One night a long time ago we were watching It'll Be Alright on the Night (a TV bloopers special) - one video showed a dancer doing a high kick and pulling a muscle, then trying to hobble through the rest of his routine. Mum laughed so long and so hard she had to leave the room, and she stood in the kitchen for about 15 minutes before she could compose herself. Well, last night I found that video (behold the power of YouTube) and I emailed it to her as a Mother's Day treat. She remembered it as clearly as I did and it was just as funny, if not more so, after 16 years. We spent the next half-hour on the phone watching video after video of people falling down and laughing until we cried. That's a pretty good Mother's Day memory.