What's the best kind of movie mum?
Good or evil, I like one we sense exists outside the margins of the movie. That's true of any character.
They're most interesting when they're so complicated that the movie can't capture all of their dimensions, and we get only tantalising glimpses.
I'm thinking of Margaret Marmee March in
Little Women, who raises extraordinary daughters without much help from their father but who's also an activist with unrealised dreams.
"I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo, but I have learned not to show it, and I still hope to learn not to feel it," says Marmee in Louisa May Alcott's book and Greta Gerwig's movie.