As They Made Us: Twee Family Drama Boasts Strong Cast, So-So Story
By Kim Hughes
Rating: C+
It’s a testament to the power of Candice Bergen’s acting prowess that she can convincingly summon a character as repulsive as the matriarch depicted in actor Mayim Bialik’s debut feature As They Made Us, a family drama checking all the family-drama boxes, from strained relationships to divorce to post-divorce dating to end-of-life care.
Bergen’s Barbara is an aural assault without an off switch which, granted, explains a lot about why this fictional family unit is strained. Even so, her performance is a rare flashpoint in this well-meaning but otherwise humdrum movie.
Barbara and Dustin Hoffman’s Eugene are the quintessential bickering marrieds. The film opens with a flashback, one of many throughout its running time, showing kiddo sibs Abigail and Nathan — played as young adults and grown-ups by Glee’s Dianna Agron and director Bialik’s Big Bang Theory co-star Simon Helberg — awkwardly sitting in the back seat of a car, staring out the window as the parental units lob vicious insults up front.
This dynamic, it is revealed, is the hallmark of the Fray family with Barbara’s ceaseless meddling, insults, put-downs, and unsolicited bits of advice the soundtrack derailing their lives and ensuring peace will not prevail.
Fast-forward to the present, and Eugene, on the cusp of his 73rd birthday, is rapidly declining. Barbara relies heavily on newly divorced, mother-of-two Abigail to help extinguish the fires she is constantly setting with Eugene’s exasperated doctors and in-home care givers. It’s a thankless, ceaseless job as well as a plot device to elevate Abigail as protagonist despite being the least complex star in this constellation.
Meanwhile, brilliant, mercurial Nathan — long estranged from his volatile parents — must decide if he can or will make amends with his father as the end looms. Abigail, at once playing nursemaid to Eugene, referee to Nathan, and doormat to Barbara, barely has time to pursue romance with hunky landscaper Jay (Justin Chu Cary) or chase a cover story with the magazine where she works.
As They Made Us gets some stuff right. Hoffman, no surprise, vividly captures the sadness, frustration, and humiliation of inhabiting a body that refuses to work the way it used to, and his death-bed scenes are powerful. Agron and Helberg also bring committed performances as siblings torn between filial obligation and a desperate need for independence though their relationship never rises above cookie-cutter level.
Filmmaker Mayim says she made this film, “as a way to reconcile the confusing conflicted experiences of trauma and violence and the loving parents my parents were in their brightest moments.
“Mostly, I wanted to paint a picture of siblings with different ways of coping who ultimately find redemption in their roles in the family – this negotiation happens in so many families and I wanted to present the complexity of that negotiation.”
As They Made Us does show Barbara and Eugene’s apparently buried devotion to each other, and it paints all conflicts that came before in comforting pastel shades, fitting for a film which counts Screen Media (A Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment Company) among its chief producers.
But the journey to reconciliation is long, plodding, and occasionally tough to stomach. The Neko Case song, “I Wish I Was the Moon” at the midway point is a nice touch, though.
CLICK HERE to see Bonnie Laufer’s interview with Mayim Bialik.
As They Made Us. Written and directed by Mayim Bialik. Starring Dianna Agron, Candice Bergen, Dustin Hoffman, Simon Helberg, and Justin Chu Cary. Available on VOD April 8th.