User Reviews

Mr. Mom launches two careers, Michael Keaton's as well as John Hughes'. Mr. Mom was Hughes' first major script and it was Michael Keaton's first major role. Michael's super as Mr. Mom. Michael Keaton starts as Mr. Mom and he goes on to be Johnny Dangerously, Beetlejuice, Batman, Doug, Jack Frost and among many other good parts. John Hughes starts with Mr. Mom and he moves on to write Summer Vacation, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Home Alone are just a few of his numerous good films.

Michael Keaton is one of my very most favorite actors. He's so funny, and good. I love Michael Keaton! He really does make Mr. Mom a hit. Teri Garr's so good too, and the kids are great. Mr. Mom is a likable comedy adventure and very approving.

Mr. Mom makes light at suburbia family home life in a lackadaisical manner. It's lighthearted fun. Mr. Mom is unbound by categorical type restrictions of classification. It's widely amusing. Mr. Mom has a cultured and impetuous personality that's adequate for the viewing. It's kind family fun. Mr. Mom has firm and flexible humor, able to transfer into alternating comedic forms with certainty. It's lovably funny. Mr. Mom invites a relating relationship with the viewer displaying familiarized family issues. It really touches home. There's nothing heavy about Mr. Mom, just a friendly flowing showing.

Despite the overall cute tone and the TV-movie production values, "Mr. Mom" is a blast, thanks primarily to a truly funny lead actor. Writer John Hughes takes the role-reversal premise of an engineer having to stay at home while the wife reenters the workforce, and places it smack in the middle of the early-80s recession (which lends the movie a solid authenticity).

Most of the comedy derives from Keaton's earnest portrayal as he navigates the jungles of housewifedom (supermarket chaos, hostile vacuum cleaners and falling into stay-at-home complacency) and seeming ease with being the movie's comedic fulcrum. Hughes' script plumbs the depths of a working man faced with the daunting responsibilities of domesticity for laughs, while colliding the housewife's experience with the the corporate boardroom mentality.

Things could easily have slipped into generic chick-flick territory. But Keaton makes all the difference.

7/10

I am an unrepentant child of the 60s. My formative years were during this time of new roles, questioning authority and more freedom. My dear wife, on the other hand, is Gen X to the bone. One of our few regular areas of disagreement? The films of the 80s.

A case in point: Mr. Mom. Despite the appealing performances of Keaton and Garr, and two admirably sleazy villains (the always-good Mull and Tambor), this film comes across as a feature-length infomercial for traditional gender roles. Keaton is a true fish out of water as a fired exec now raising the kids, while bored housewife Garr returns to work and encounters sexual harrassment, overtime and mandatory travel. <SPOILER>Though both eventually succeed at the role reversal, in the end the marriage is threatened and Garr decides she is happier as a full time mommy, leaving the better-adjusted Keaton to the big, bad world of business.</SPOILER>

The year that this film was made (1983) is instructive. The new freedom of the 60s and early 70s was ancient history. The Reagan years and their resultant Social Darwinism were in high gear; women who could afford it were being advised to leave the high-powered jobs to the "more fit" men, go home and have babies. Mr. Mom represented an exaggerated depiction of this return to traditional, socially defined roles for men and women. Whether the media became more conservative in response to Reaganism, or whether entertainment led the way to more conservative views, is a moot point. The end result—a noticeable rightward shift in our entertainment—was the same. Mr. Mom was one of the first Hollywood films to reflect the nation's conservative mood...there would be many others. These films are largely laughable today, and remain worthwhile mainly as an exercise in sociology, illustrating how movies both reflect and change the culture that produces them.

Having just made a splash in "Night Shift", Michael Keaton got another really funny role in "Mr. Mom". As struggling dad Jack Butler, he and wife Caroline (Teri Garr) decide to switch roles: he'll stay home while she works. Needless to say, it proves to be not quite that easy.

"Mr. Mom" was the sort of early-'80's comedy that showed how cinematic comedy was shifting toward the outright loony. But don't worry, this one is totally zany without being idiotic (a previous viewer noted that this was before Hollywood wanted comedy to be scatological all the time). Moreover, there's a distinct feeling of realism here: when Caroline applies for a job, the boss comes on to her (I have heard of such instances). A really funny movie.

And yes, when I first read the title (long before I actually saw the movie), I assumed that "Mr. Mom" was an action movie or something such. The title was listed right next to "Night Shift", which I assumed was a horror movie; boy was I wrong!

Mr. Mom sets up so many comedy patterns for the 80s.

Michael Keaton: Born in Pittsburgh - Kennedy Township or McKee's Rocks - and starting his career on Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, Keaton went to LA and his first big role was Night Shift, which led to this movie. His character in his early films is often a very Bill Murray smart everyman who deals with life's pains before being smart enough to come out on top, a role he would play in Gung Ho - made close to home in Beaver, PA - and Johnny Dangerously. By Beetlejuice and Batman, he was as big a star as it gets. He's a rare star in that even though his career has had ebbs and flows, he's always been great in everything he's made and comes off as, well, a Yinzer. Someone you'd like to have an Iron with. He's playing that character he's known for here, a smart guy whom life has treated badly named Jack Butler. He's lost his auto job and is now the stay-at-home dad while his wife works.

Teri Garr: I wonder if Keaton and Garr ever got into silly Pittsburgh versus Cleveland spats; she's from Lakewood. Trained in ballet and a student of Lee Strasberg, her career has vacillated between comedy - Young Frankenstein, Tootsie - and drama - The Conversation, One from the Heart, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I always think of her as the mom who is way funnier than she should be, probably because this movie is what I knew her from. Her Caroline is intelligent, capable and more than a match for anyone in the movie.

Martin Mull: It's difficult to explain to young folks the impact and strangeness of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and the spin-off Fernwood 2 Night. Soap operas were all normal, straight affairs before that show and the fact that a supposedly legitimate talk show from the setting of that show could exist on its own outside of the show is even stranger. By this point in his career, Mull was often the smarmy bad guy, a role he would play in Take This Job and Shove It, Cutting Class, Ski Patrol and so many more.

Important friends: This film follows what would be an 80s staple. Often, the friends and small roles are just as funny as the main characters, like Christopher Lloyd as fellow unemployed car worker Larry, Edie McClurg as a check-out lady (McClurg's career is filled with memorable small roles), Ann Jillian as flirty mom Joan (as an 11-year-old boy, I had no idea what I was feeling when I saw Ann Jillian, but I knew she didn't look like any other woman I knew) and another Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman actor Graham Jarvis.

John Hughes: Story editor and producer Lauren Shuler read a John Hughes article in National Lampoon which caused her to become friends with him. A story he told her about taking care of his kids made her laugh; could it be a movie? They finished the script together, but the fact that Hughes lived in Chicago and not Hollywood led to Universal firing him and bringing in TV writers to redo the script. Shuler always claimed that the original script was a lot funnier.

Don't feel bad for Hughes. He's already sold National Lampoon's Class Reunion and National Lampoon's Vacation. This movie got him a three-picture deal and he made Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Weird Science in just two years. By the 90s, he moved back to Chicago and died too young at 59. If you were alive in the 80s, his comedy shaped so much of what you watched, from the popular teen comedies to secretly anarchic movies like Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Vacation.

The idea for this is simple. Jack loses his job, his wife is smarter than him and becomes a success in advertising (a field Hughes knew well, he had created the Edge Credit Card Shaving Test ads) while he stays home all day doing what she used to do. Where it works is the creativity of director Stan Dragoti (Love At First Bite), cinematographer Victor J. Kemper (The Hospital, Eyes of Laura Mars, The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure) and Keaton, who is beyond likable and never gets to be too much like other stars would be in such a high energy role.

Where this movie is ahead of its time is that Caroline still gets the career that she wants. The movie ends seeing her commercial on TV and her getting more money and more respect from her boss.

If anything, Mr. Mom has given us this dialogue, which is as funny today as it was in forty years ago.

Jack: No problem. Come on over here Ron. Let me show you what I'm doing, taking advantage of some of the time off. To, uh, add a whole new wing on here. Gonna rip these walls out and, uh, of course re-wire it.

Ron: Yeah, you gonna make it all 220?

Jack: Yeah, 220, 221. Whatever it takes.