Film

Mr Mom (1983)

Director: Stan Dragoti

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

In these post-feminist times, you might have thought that the spectacle of men doing housework was a little played out as a subject for comedy. But this - in which unemployment forces Keaton to swop roles with his wife Garr - plays the usual trick of taking a '30s formula and pushing it far further than it has gone before. Keaton visibly disintegrates into an alcoholic, pill-popping soap opera addict, until he screams the final admission to his wife: 'My brain is like oatmeal. I never knew it was like this.' Written by ex-Lampoon regular John Hughes, the film is funniest when it is detailing the psychological horrors of housework, notably the awful pull of the soap opera which begins to merge with Keaton's domestic reality. The various props, like the voracious vacuum cleaner, are less successful, but Hughes still manages to play on the anxieties of middle America with fairly devilish skill.

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