A couple weeks back I was driving home from the movie theater after seeing Incredibles 2 (2018): a movie that was almost worth the fourteen year wait after the… ahem… incredible first movie dropped in 2004. I casually turned to my wife and remarked how much I enjoyed that Mr. Incredible’s B-plot in the movie was basically a rehash of Mr. Mom (1983). She stared at me for a few seconds, blank faced and cow eyed, before telling me that she had no idea what I was talking about.
“Mr. Mom? You know… Michael Keaton loses his job… he has play homemaker while his wife starts earning the big bucks… comedy ensues?”
Nope. Nothing. Nada. She’d never heard of it before.
After a cursory grilling of my other friends, I found that she wasn’t alone, either. Virtually nobody seemed to have heard about this 1983 Michael Keaton comedy from back before he took on the role of the Caped Crusader. And that’s a real shame.
Granted, it’s easily overshadowed in his own filmography by his more iconic (Batman, Beetlejuice) and more recent (Birdman, Spotlight) work. And granted, the orientation for its sexual politics are hopelessly dated in today’s world (where the mere fact that a woman might be the co-, if not sole, breadwinner for a family isn’t the setup for a feature-length punchline). And, yes, it was released during a massive glut of admittedly much funnier classic comedies in the 1980s.
Despite all of these, however, Mr. Mom hardly deserves its pathetic non-reputation as a forgotten comedy of the early eighties (a fate it shares, and for similar reasons, with 1996’s Multiplicity, another Keaton comedy vehicle). Even today, if you can get past how ultimately dated the basic premise is, it remains a fun, funny, quick-witted and even insightful film regarding 1980s sexual politics and the retrograde idea of the head-of-household male whose sole duty it is to provide for his family (and the kind of listless ennui that can result from the subversion of the same).
As the film opens, Jack Butler (Michael Keaton) is living the American Dream: beautiful wife, three kids, big house and a steady job working as an automotive engineer. But when the economy hits an unexpected slump, he’s let go from his job and throws his family’s future prospects in uncertain disarray. And when he can’t find a new job, his wife Caroline (Terri Garr) gets a job as an advertising executive, making use of her education and experience earned before she gave it all up to raise a family.
The rest of the movie is pretty much a straight-line from there: hitting all of the expected gags inherent in both its “stay-at-home mom becomes a career woman” and “sole bread-winner awkwardly adapts to life as a homemaker” plot lines. Caroline struggles to “turn off” her mothering instincts in board rooms filled with her coworkers and superiors and struggles to rebuff the advances of her lecherous boss. Jack, meanwhile, struggles to come to terms with the surprising (at least to him) complexities of domestic life: cooking, cleaning, shopping and tending to the kids’ various daily activities.
And, yes, if you’ve seen Incredibles 2, this really is that movie sans all of the superpowers and with the sensibilities of suburban America 30-odd years ago. And while there might not have been a Jack-Jack in the family (and certainly no late-night raccoon fights), there was Megan (Courtney / Brittany White). And look, one of the kids is played by Taliesin Jaffe (best known for playing Percy on Critical Role)!
So if you found yourself wanting a bit more of Mr. in Incredibles 2 (or if you just want to delve into some more great Michael Keaton movies that don’t involve tights or vulture wings), Mr. Mom might just be the solution to your problem. It’s a great 80’s comedy that never quite made it out of that decade with the likes of The Blues Brothers (1980), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) and Christmas Vacation (1989).
