If you want to watch Mary and Martha, don’t. If you do, don’t read any descriptions of Mary and Martha other than mine because the single sentence summary gave away the plot of the majority of the movie! I thought that the pivotal plot point would occur in the first five minutes of Mary and Martha, but when it didn’t, I realized that someone screwed up, and I was bored waiting for the spoiler to happen. Once spoiler does happen, Mary and Martha does not improve. Despite good intentions, Mary and Martha is a dull and inadvertently annoying film.
Hilary Swank plays Mary. Mary is the real main character. Mary has a job, but the kind that you can drop and pick up at will while your husband does the real financial heavy lifting. She is alarmed that her family is not as close as she would like and feels like her son deserves better. Without consulting her husband, she unilaterally decides to take their son out of school for an adventure, but her level of preparation is dreadful. She doesn’t even have books or teaching skills and opts to teach him on the road with whatever she finds on the internet. Brenda Blethyn, whom I loved in Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, plays Martha. Her much adored, personable and hot son decides to volunteer at an orphanage in Mozambique. Mary and Martha shows the mother and son and hot British son during their respective travels.
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Both sons die from malaria. Mary and Martha basically spends the rest of the movie astonished that children die of malaria. Isn’t that awful. Who knew? WHO KNEW!?! Something must be done!
Mary was already a pretty insufferable character before tragedy strikes, but grief makes her worse. She guilts all her yoga-loving friends with living meaningless lives, which um, don’t you go there too. She hates it when people are crying at her son’s funeral and asks her husband to stop them because she is sadder and isn’t crying. She interrupts her state representative with nothing concrete just DO SOMETHING! Martha visits her out of the blue. Cue research montage, and then at the Congressional subcommittee meeting, facts don’t matter, faces and feelings do. They did terrific. They bring a truck full of supplies to the orphanage. Yeah! Um, so did it work though? What did Congress do differently after their presentation? It doesn’t matter! Hurrah! I thought it was based on a real story. It wasn’t. I want my 90 minutes back.
Mary and Martha is a tone-deaf visual version of a certain Rudyard Kipling poem, but it is marketed as an uplifting message movie. If you don’t get the Kipling reference, you may enjoy Mary and Martha.