Movie review: Loverboy spotlights parental attachment issues

Whoa. You know how when something hits you between the eyes you open them a little wider. Saw a movie lasta night called Loverboy, starring Kevin Bacon (though you have to struggle to recognize his character, and this is his debut as a director), Matt Dillon, jeepers-Sandra-Bullock, and especially Kyra Sedgwick (the filmmaker adores her with the camera throughout the movie). Review here.

This is a film that addresses powerfully and directly some of the issues we wrote about in a recent post here surrounding young single women deciding to have babies on their own. It addresses some things almost no one wants to think about in regard to this phenomenon--like could single mothers who have babies on their own get inappropriately attached to those kids and in their possessiveness keep them from having wholly healthy experiences. And it juxtaposes this examination with a fairly hard-hitting look at the other messy issue we've recently talked about: how having two parents doesn't mean you're going to raise an emotionally healthy kid. After all, in this film the devoted/possessive single mom was raised by two parents who adored each other.

It's not a great movie. It's a bit too focused on "ain't Kyra beautiful." And it's kind of tragic, especially the ending. But it looks at some tough issues that we're probably going to see more often as women increasingly choose to remain single and also to seek motherhood--and by the way as more married women delay motherhood and end up going for in-vitro fertilization, which often results in a passionate attachment on both parents' parts to the child that's finally born. So if you don't want to look at those kinds of issues, don't see the film.

But I guess I'd say the same thing about Bridges of Madison County, which addresses uncomfortable issues surrounding love and marriage and infidelity.