Monster-In-Law (101 Minutes)
"Kevin is charming in a way that would definitely fail the 'Danny DeVito Test'."
Throwing on Monster-In Law (2005) almost felt like a punishment for starting this newsletter in the first place. Prior to writing this post, I had never seen it before, and it’s unclear if I ever would have if it weren’t for the parameters I set for myself here. The tone of the movie is all over the place and it falls into some of the worst rom com pitfalls out there, but that said, it does have some charming moments and I can see why people have an attachment to it. Over the summer it reached a spot on Netflix’s coveted Top 10 list, and fans lit up Twitter praising it over and over again.
While it’s hard for me to praise Monster-In-Law, I can at least thank it for bringing the amazing Jane Fonda out of film retirement. I’m normally a fan of simple plots when it comes to 90-minute movies (please don’t complicate our short time together) but Monster-In-Law makes me regret that viewpoint. It’s one of those movies where you know exactly how it will end. The title is doing all the heavy lifting here. (And so is Jane Fonda, her arms in this are sick.) Charlie (Jennifer Lopez) is a temp/dog walker/cater-waiter (a hustler not to be confused with her pivotal role in Hustlers) who meets Dr. Kevin Fields (Michael Vartan) and quickly falls in love. The day she meets his mother, Viola (Jane Fonda), Kevin also proposes which, unbeknownst to Charlie at the time, sends his recently-fired, recently-released-from-a-mental-health-facility mother into a tailspin. The two women spend the rest of the movie feuding while Kevin walks around like a big dummy.
The most redeeming qualities of this movie all happen in the last 40 minutes or so of the runtime. The first hour is an excessive amount of set-up that we don’t really need to understand or connect with these characters. Rather than introducing us to everyone the day Charlie meets Kevin’s mother, we get a rushed version of a traditional rom com. A mini movie of “boy meets girl”. Charlie meets Kevin, they have a couple mix-ups, and Kevin is charming in a way that would definitely fail the “Danny DeVito Test”. (The Danny DeVito Test is something popular on Reddit, where essentially if replacing the actor to Danny DeVito makes the character creepy, then he was always creepy.) When Charlie asks him to tell her the color of her eyes he does this. They’ve only spoken once and that was in a dark room. Again, I say, he does THIS after she fails to return his call. Creep factor is high, but Charlie is really into it and they go out.
While this is all going on we meet Viola and her assistant Ruby (Wanda Sykes) just as Viola is fired from her television show and sent to a mental health facility (which I believe people in the movie keep calling a “loony bin” because it’s 2005). Viola has anger management and control issues and calls her son eight times a day. Every day. Mind you, this is never addressed as truly weird behavior until Charlie makes her agree to one phone call a day at the end of the movie as they’re bargaining to basically cope with one another. Viola also kisses her son on the lips when they greet, transferring her bright red lipstick to his mouth, which made me cringe into the bottom of my shoes. And while it paints a beautiful picture of just how possessive Viola is over her son, it doesn’t carry the kind of weight it should. And none of it ever goes anywhere as Viola gets off easy in the end. Sure she attempts to poison Charlie with almonds (to which she is allergic) but at least she’s not going to wear white to the wedding! The bar for a decent mother-in-law is comically low in this one.
Viola’s toxic behavior toward her son is a good example of how all-over-the-place this movie is tonally. This Queerty article said it best when it described the film as “scattershot”. I had whiplash between its more even, basic rom com tone and the slapstick, campy moments like when the two women daydream about seriously injuring one another. It feels like the filmmakers were afraid to get too weird, hoping to make Monster universally appealing. Or maybe a producer got involved, but either way it muddies the tonal color. I wish they had leaned into the physical comedy and the over-the-top hatred these two women have for one another even more. Those are the scenes that we remember.
Speaking of being memorable… Kevin (Vartan) is an afterthought of a character the entire movie. He’s the outline of a man someone forgot to fill in. So why do we need the sentimental moments with him at all? Why do we need the 30-minute love story? (I really hate the first half of this movie if you couldn’t tell.) I want all those minutes back to watch Fonda and Lopez and Sykes go HARD against each other. I mean, Viola kicks Ruby in the crotch multiple times in the almond poisoning scene. “I think you dislocated my vagina,” she cries. It may not be refined humor, but it’s humor. Other bright spots include Adam Scott playing the “gay best friend” Remy (with minimal stereotyping) and Elaine Stritch stealing her entire scene. In fact at the end of it, Remy escorts her out and says, “Ok, I love you.” Delivered only in that way Scott can.
Though Remy is one of those bright spots, the movie is otherwise confused as to how to handle homosexuality and layers in jokes that serve no purpose than to otherwise say “Hey, did you guys know gays exist?” When I think about 2005, it does make sense. Film and TV wanted to engage with the LGBTQ community… but had no idea what they were doing and also did not limit jokes or storylines that came at the expense of that community. As if the tone of Monster-In-Law wasn’t already scattershot, their inclusion with simultaneous exclusion of this community only adds to the confusion and lets us down as viewers.
If I could have watched this as a 40-minute movie, just enjoying the highlights, I’d be a much happier person who could rank and rate this much higher. But the tonal whiplash will forever haunt me. Not because it was so bad to watch, because I am left wondering about the film that could have been. Yes, this is the movie that brought Jane Fonda out of retirement and for that we have to be forever grateful. (What would I do with Grace and Frankie?) But with all its missteps and confusion, for me it can only live in the “watched one time” category of movies. I won’t go back and you can’t make me.
Sources:
https://graziamagazine.com/us/articles/jane-fonda-jennifer-lopez-monster-in-law/
https://www.queerty.com/long-forgotten-gay-movie-suddenly-trending-netflix-20220415
https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/jennifer-lopez-netflix-streaming-movie.html
The biggest crime in the movie was releasing Jane Fonda's character from the mental institution.