2021's Courting Mom and Dad is a Christian Anti-Divorce Movie That Puzzlingly Shows Why Divorcing Scott Baio Would Actually Be a Good Thing
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Whenever I see that a movie contains more than a few proudly right-wing, Trump-supporting actors I assume that it is explicitly or implicitly Christian even if Ben Shapiro is the Executive Producer.
The Conservative Christian Entertainment Complex is a sad and sorry thing, a collection of stinkers proudly proselytizing on behalf of the good Lord but forgetting the whole part about being entertaining.
When I saw that Hollywood Republicans Scott Baio and Kristy Swanson (The ObamaGate Movie) were joining forces for the 2021 romantic comedy Courting Mom and Dad, for example, I guessed, correctly as it turns out, that its primarily goal would be promoting Christian values.
I was correct. Courting Mom and Dad is a heavy-handed Christian movie that illustrates the evils of divorce through the story of a dead, loveless marriage between two cold, unlikable people that should definitely end and the punishingly precocious tykes sadistically trying to extend their parents’ marriage indefinitely for their own benefit.
The puzzling decisions begin with a wildly unnecessary framing device that posits the film’s primary action as an elaborate flashback and includes additional flashbacks to 1998, when it is hinted that Baio’s character is around college age when the actor playing him was born in 1960.
Baio’s Brent Lambert meets bland with Swanson’s Sarah at the restaurant where he works and she eats. They fall in love, get married and have children. Then they fall out of love and separate. They’ve been separated for nearly a year and seem understandable EXTREMELY certain about their wise and prudent decision to end their sexless, arctic sham of a legal union after fifty-one long weeks apart.
The couple’s cute kids labor under the bizarre and tragic delusion that behind their parent’s icy exteriors and equally arctic interiors and clear-cut and richly merited disdain for each other lies love and a noble desire to not make Baby Jesus weep through the sin of divorce.
Courting Mom and Dad asks the question, “Can this marriage be saved?” then definitively answers, “Of course not. These people hate each other and for good reason. Would you want to be married to Scott Baio?”
Then it realized that it was a Christian movie about the sanctity of marriage and the importance of keeping the family unit intact at all costs and amended its answer to, “Actually, of COURSE this marriage can be saved. Through’s Christ love all is possible. Amen.”
You’ve really got to hand it to Baio. Usually lead actors in a comedy are tempted to make their characters likable and funny, attractive and memorable, distinctive and delightful. Not Baio. He doesn’t go for any of that pandering crap. He doesn’t try to be likable or entertaining or funny or appealing in any way whatsoever. He barely even smiles. He smiles more on the movie poster than he does in the film itself.
Instead Baio’s empty suit is a lukewarm grey blob of a man, a low-energy, low-intensity bore who is checked out of his marriage and checked out of life and consequently oblivious to the wildly unnecessary corporate chicanery/insider trading subplot that takes up a shocking amount of a punishing 89 minute runtime that somehow finds time for five minutes of outtakes.
The outtakes are frustrating because they show the cast having fun and bursting into guffaws when they otherwise seem to be trudging joylessly through this monstrosity. Why should they get to have fun when we don’t? It’s not fair!
The kids object to their folks FINALLY putting their marriage out of its misery. These precious tots should not have any say in the matter. If Courting Mom and Dad were a different kind of Christian movie it would not look anywhere near as kindly on sassy kids telling their parents what to do and how to live their lives.
But since Courting Mom and Dad is a pro-divorce movie that thinks it’s an anti-divorce manifesto it aggressively cosigns the radical notion that kids should be able to veto their parents permanently ending their legal unions on account of it makes them sad and also is unChristian.
As a pastor helpfully explains, “Divorce tears at God’s redemptive plan for the world” so even though it sure looks and sounds like the protagonists have an awful marriage and should get divorced the movie tries pathetically to trick us into thinking that these crazy kids should DEFINITELY get back together.
Courting Mom and Dad has a fatal flaw in that it wants to be a fun, faith-based romp in the Parent Trap mold but feels more like a superficial Christian take on Kramer Versus Kramer. These joyless souls REALLY hate each other. They hate themselves for good measure. And WE hate them despite the film’s very occasional attempts to render them at least a tiny bit sympathetic.
The kids are a different story. They’re cloyingly cute perfect Christians whose shenanigans are brightly lit and relentlessly upbeat where their parents are drearily going through the motions.
To help them in their selfish quest to keep nature from taking its course the trio hires a headline-chasing lawyer played by John, the third most impressive Farley brother.
John has that James Belushi thing going on where he sounds and looks just like his more famous sibling but whose talent is far more modest. So when we look at John Farley or James Belushi, we see and hear echoes of their brothers that just make us miss them more.
Courting Mom and Dad doesn’t seem to realize that it’s not divorce that makes people miserable; it’s staying in a miserable union that gives you no happiness or satisfaction and that eats away at the soul.
Yet its feels bound by faith to pretend that divorce is the true evil and that if folks were just forced to fall back in love with each other they’d be so happy they’d never stop smiling.
That is sad, not inspirational. It takes seventy minutes for the husband and wife to show each other any affection. By then it’s too little too late, yet the film nevertheless cheats big time and gives itself a happy ending it in no way deserves, where two miserable people who clearly hate each other decide to get back together and give marriage their all.
Courting Mom and Dad is not as incompetent as many faith-based productions but it does not work on a level that is both rare, fascinating and revealing.
It’s one of those surreal enterprises that thinks it’s saying one thing when it’s actually saying something much different. It thinks that it’s showing how love for family can overcome anything when it’s really pointing out the necessity of being able to end a marriage that has died an unmourned death.
I came away from the film more convinced than ever that when a couple with children get divorced, it’s usually for the best and not a decision either party has entered into lightly.
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