The Unbearable Lightness of Children: How "The Lost Daughter" and "C'Mon C'Mon" Depict Parenthood

“Children are a crushing responsibility.” - Leda in The Lost Daughter

“I don’t know if he’s spoiled . . . or if I am.” - Johnny in C’Mon C’Mon

Right now a lot of Oscar buzz is revolving around Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film Lost Daughter, starring Olivia Colman as Leda, a middle-aged professor whose solo retreat to a Greek beach resort is complicated by the arrival of a young mother and her high-maintenance daughter, the constant visions of which prompt distressing memories of raising her own two daughters. The movie is exceptionally shot and incredibly well acted, and I didn’t like it very much at all.

I didn’t like it not only because it kept giving a sense of building to some dark secret reveal that never happened, but also because its depiction of children is shallow and dehumanizing. Oh, yes, I know the feminist message the film is toying with is still considered bold and relevant — I’ve read enough interviews and think pieces to see that — but still it treats motherhood as stifling and oppressive, which is a “traditional” Hollywood view that is, frankly, boring at this point.

Leda is a self-centered person. She resents her kids and the impediment they are to her career. She seeks refuge in an affair, and then leaves her husband and kids (for three years!) to pursue her personal ambitions. I will give the film credit for depicting how a young life of selfishness can result in an older life of irritability and loneliness. But the film’s depiction of children still bothers me. The little girls in the movie are not treated as persons, but as props. I even noticed how for a large portion of the movie, in both modern day and flashback scenes, the faces of the girls were obscured. The children exist as faceless avatars of burden.

Contrast this instead with Mike Mills’s latest film C’Mon C’Mon, about documentarian Johnny who becomes the caretaker for his young nephew Woody while the boy’s mother (Johnny’s sister) attends to arranging care for her mentally ill husband. The parental premise of this movie is very similar to The Lost Daughter, actually — kids are incredible disruptions to adult life. C’Mon C’Mon doesn’t just nod to that reality; it practically revolves around it. And yet the message is entirely different.

For one thing, Woody is a fully fleshed out person. He is the co-lead of the film. I know this is structurally different from The Lost Daughter’s plot, but it dignifies childhood, personalizes childhood. C’Mon C’Mon treats the obnoxious, disruptive, precocious kid as a human being with thoughts, feelings, motivations, and, yes, even a brokenness of his own that is at least as worthy of tending to as the adults’ brokenness around him, if not more so. The dignity of children even becomes a thematic through-line, as Johnny’s latest project has him traveling the country, interviewing kids about their hopes and fears for the future.

Secondly, the mother in C’Mon C’Mon, Viv, is at least as put upon as The Lost Daughter’s Leda. But not only does she have an exhausting child — her phone calls with Johnny basically revolve around him asking her how she manages — she also has a severely ill husband who is off and on medication, in and out of hospitalization. She is weary, constantly emptying, frequently frustrated. But there is never a question that she loves her son, that she’ll do anything for the needs of her family.

The central relationship is between Johnny and Woody, of course, and we see how having to arrange your life around the survival (and entertainment) of a little human requires a reevaluation of priorities and values. At one point Johnny muses to his audio recorder, “I don’t know if he’s spoiled, or if I am,” revealing how his relationship with Woody, however temporary, is exposing his own self-centeredness.

And this is what parenting does. It is sanctifying in this way. No, none of us who raise children get to “have it all.” And when our flesh bumps up rudely against the blessed requirements of raising children in the way they should go, we find out how fragile we really are and of course then who we’re really trying to see exalted in our lives.