The promise bled out of Mike Bennings before his life did.
He could’ve been a professional baseball player, if all had gone well. But he turned away from baseline chalk and turned instead to lines of white powder—and plenty of other substances, too. And when the junkie is gunned down outside a stash house in Albany, New York, even his own mother isn’t all that shocked.
But the loss hurts all the same. Hurts like crazy.
Marissa Bennings knew Mike’s potential more than anything. And yeah, the longtime newspaper journalist accepts some of the blame for what he became, too. But not all. Most of it she lays at the feet of Mike’s girlfriend, Paige. And when she sees Paige at Mike’s funeral, she walks right up to her, pulls her hand back and slaps her right in the face.
The blow was already in motion when she heard Paige blurt, “I’m pregnant.”
Later, at a bar—Marissa’s familiar with bars—Marissa apologies. “I wouldn’t have hit you if I’d known.” But inside, Marissa’s still fuming. Maybe if Paige hadn’t come into Mike’s life, he never would’ve fallen so hard into drug use. He never would’ve started stealing. And maybe he and Marissa could’ve had a real relationship—not just Mike leaving the occasional voicemail, at turns apologetic and furious.
Paige knows Marissa doesn’t like her. And she sees something else.
“I didn’t come to argue or beg,” Paige tells her. “I’m here because I loved Michael, and I’m sad he’s gone. And I know that you are, too. Even if you’re only capable of being mad right now, I know that you’re just sad.”
Maybe Paige is right, but no matter. She and Marissa are tied together now. First, by the baby growing inside Paige’s belly. And two, by the need to find Mike’s killer. With a new, dangerous drug spreading over the city—one that Mike might’ve known something about—he might not be the only one to die.
Just the first.
Paige’s past could be described, charitably, as “checkered.” She was a junkie, too—and Paige certainly did her own share of stealing and lying while in the throes of drug use.
But she’s been clean for a while now, and Paige insists that Mike was trying to change his ways, too. Paige—more than anyone—wants to find out what happened to him.
Her pursuit of justice helps Marissa, too. The journalist drinks heavily—she has ever since her husband, Frank, died. She’s really a shell of a woman when we first meet her, eager to slip back into the solace of a bottle.
But Paige won’t let that happen. She pokes and prods Marissa to take an active role in exploring Mike’s murder. She prods Marissa to go to grief counseling. When Paige’s own apartment gets broken into, Paige flees to Marissa’s house—forcing the older woman into a role of a protector. The two become friends, and that friendship helps usher Marissa into a new stage of sobriety and healthy activity.
[Spoiler warning] One can question whether Marissa is “the good mother” of the title. But when Mike’s and Paige’s baby is born, she proves to be a pretty good grandmother.
We hear a pastor recite Bible verses and share spiritual thoughts during a funeral. A grief support group meets in a synagogue, and its leader tells a long-absent attendee that they’ve been all praying for her. A neon sign on a building takes the shape of a cross and reads, “Jesus Saves.”
When Marissa asks Paige if she can be sure the baby is Mike’s, Paige makes a crude reference to her anatomy and lack of sexual activity.
Marissa has another son named Toby, who’s a police officer. He’s married, and he and his wife (Gina) are trying to have a baby. We see Toby inject a fertility drug into his wife’s exposed tummy.
Mike’s killer shoots Mike from the window of a truck. The scene is bloodless, but we do see the body lying in the street.
A corpse is found in a drug house—an electrical cord tied around his neck, with the other end tethered to a dangling cinderblock. The scene is not bloody, but it’s pretty disturbing. Someone dies from an apparent drug overdose. We hear from a grieving mother about how she found her own daughter’s body, also dead from a virulent street drug.
Two people struggle at the top of a set of stairs. One person falls (or is pushed) and is knocked unconscious. Someone else is thwapped on the head with something and knocked out. As mentioned, Marissa punches Paige in the face.
Ne’er-do-wells break into Paige’s apartment. Paige, fearing for her life, escapes out a window and suffers a drop to the ground below.
About 40 f-words and 15 s-words. We also hear a couple of uses each of “a–” and “h—.” God’s and Jesus’ name are each misused twice, as well.
The movie centers around a new street drug named Mother’s Milk—a mixture of heroin, cocaine and fentanyl, we’re told. Toby tells his mother, Marissa, that he believes Mike and his friend, Ducky, were selling the drug in Albany. When Paige finds a huge cache of Mother’s Milk in Mike’s belongings (labeled “MM”), it seems to confirm a connection. (It’s described as “$50,000 of dirty heroin.”)
A grieving mother talks about how she discovered her daughter’s body—a bag with the logo MM emblazoned on it laying nearby. Later, the mom encourages Marissa to come with her to a safe needle exchange site, where junkies have access to clean syringes and can inject themselves without worry. “Maybe if my baby had gone to one of these instead of hiding in her room,” the mother says, she’d still be alive.
Other drugs come into play as well. Mike, Paige and Ducky were all using various substances, and Paige talks about how she and Mike had gotten their own place to “get clean.” Mike’s withdrawal symptoms were serious and frightening. When Paige asks Gina what it’s like to be married to a cop, Gina says that part of you accepts that, one day, your husband might not come home. “Sounds like dating a junkie,” Paige says.
But the drug we see actually abused most often on screen isn’t an illegal substance at all: It’s alcohol.
Marissa drinks heavily. When we first see her, she’s waking up after a night passed out on the couch, a bottle of booze sitting nearby. She promises to pick up Paige from a doctor’s appointment—but then forgets and winds up drinking herself into a stupor at a local bar.
She and Toby play billiards at another dive, with Marissa polishing off one glass of alcohol and curtly demanding another. One of the first things she asks for when she enters Toby’s house one day is whether he has any whiskey around. She guzzles more liquor in the bathtub, watching old videos of Mike. She pours alcohol into her coffee.
And all this is, it’s suggested, an improvement. After Mike dies, Gina reminds Toby about how bad Marissa’s drinking got after Frank, Marissa’s husband, died. “Yeah, I definitely remember,” Toby says. (Marissa’s dependence on alcohol seems to lessen as the movie goes on.)
Marissa also carries around an unlit cigarette, and she sucks on it when she’s stressed. Toby asks for a “drag” on the thing, and he quips that it actually does seem to help.
It’s suggested that Mike’s first encounter with drugs happened when he was 15, when the budding athlete was already being given meds to help him deal with pain.
As mentioned, Paige is pregnant. When she spends the night at Marissa’s house, she asks Marissa whether her “puking” kept her up. Later, when Paige sees a disturbing sight, she retches.
Paige also owns up to the fact that she and Mike stole things when they were deeply under the influence of drugs. Marissa ticks off a list of what they stole from her. And when Gina compliments Paige’s necklace, she says, with a smile, “I stole it from Target.”
When Paige begins her search for Mike’s killer and ropes Marissa into it, Marissa at first protests that what they’re doing is “not legal or ethical.” Their off-the-book investigation is done without police involvement or knowledge, and Paige at one point goes past a police barrier.
Motherhood is, truly, the mother of all challenges. Sure, perhaps some kids are easy to raise. They follow the template and fulfill your expectations. Maybe they get a bad grade or two. Or get sent to the principal once or twice. Maybe they don’t clean their rooms or talk back sometimes. But overall, they turn out just as Mom hoped. Just as Mom planned.
But it doesn’t always work that way.
Maybe Marissa was a good mother back in the day. We see snippets of what she was like when her kids were younger—a gentle voice behind the camcorder, encouraging, praising.
But Mike didn’t go according to plan. And Toby—well, he had his own issues.
Just like this movie.
The Good Mother is about motherhood and grief, about sad endings and new beginnings. But it’s also about alcohol and drugs and how incredibly damaging and dangerous both can be. The story’s told with plenty of profanity. Difficult (though not particularly bloody) scenes coat the screen. And honestly, I had hoped that with all its weighty elements and gritty issues that we have to wade through, the film would have a better payoff. But the film’s ambitions outstretched its artistry, and we’re left feeling a bit dissatisfied.
The Good Mother, despite being anchored by two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank, isn’t a good movie. And while it tells us that motherhood is hard and that drugs and drinking are bad for you, we don’t need a bad movie to tell us that, do we?
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
