'Motherhood' review

Uma Thurman and David Schallipp (Credit: Freestyle)

There just aren't enough hours in the day for mother-of-two Eliza (Uma Thurman), who has to throw her daughter's birthday party and apply for a job with a parenting magazine while running errands and avoiding the film crew shooting on her street. Her husband (Anthony Edwards, pretty bad) isn't much help and her best friend (Minnie Driver) is just another person to keep happy, so what's a busy mom to do?

The buzz: Motherhood is a wildly demanding task that certainly deserves to have its peaks and valleys put on film. The question is if writer-director Katherine Dieckmann ("Diggers") can really encapsulate all of Eliza's pride, struggles and sacrifices in the course of one crazy day.

The verdict: Thurman's quite good, portraying Eliza as a woman trying to find a sense of self wherever she can get it. (A dance-your-stress-away scene feels phony but reiterates that this character's moments of carefree fun are fleeting.) But Dieckmann so focuses on Eliza's need to look out for number one that she obscures the reasons people become parents, winding up with a movie light on love and heavy on narcissism. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean free of quirk, as a host of oddball neighbors distract from reality while the film's sunny polish dully suggests at all times that everything's going to be OK.

Did you know? Eliza learns of an event called Momapalooza thrown for "Moms who rock." How long until Perry Farrell tries to snag a slot for Jane's Addiction?

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