A horrid selfishness

I would have thought that one of the parts of given to Meryl Streep in Ricki and the Flash was an error on the part of the script writer if I hadn't seen it for myself.  Streep's character is one of a divorcee who has not lived with her children.  Apparently, the children had sided with their father in the divorce.  Nothing was ever explicitly stated, but one gets the idea that Ricki (Streep) had not been stable or present enough in the kids' lives for them to respect her.

During the course of the movie her adult children definitely didn't want her to be a part of their lives.  The script writer here doesn't show a callousness in Ricki's character but a willingness to support her children with the awareness that they didn't want her around.  That's reality in the case of many broken marriages.  That part of the story is plausible.

But, without reason, there is a scene in which Ricki's boyfriend from the band she plays in tries to encourage her to go to her grown son's wedding.  She had actually been invited.  But she was going to miss it since she was aware of the son's animosity toward her.  So her boyfriend goads her to go, saying, "It doesn't matter if they don't love you.  It's not their job to love you.  It's your job to love them,"  (1:44-1:48).

My first reaction to that line was one of artificiality.  What parent doesn't know that?  Children are fickle.  Anyone who has raised teenagers knows this.  Anyone who has raised a child to age 25 knows how egocentric he or she is.  It's no mystery you have to love your kids through certain stages before they achieve an adult understanding of life.  I thought the script writer had  made a glaring error in his writing.

But, I have seen this first hand in at least three different women.  They bore resentments toward their daughters in their cases.  They castigated them, put them off, and treated them horridly saying that their children didn't show them the proper love and respect.  They didn't know it was their job to love their children, rather than waiting for their adult children to show them the respect they thought they deserved.  It's not pretty, but it is reality.  I appreciated the script writer for showing how real the situation was and for having a character try to coax a selfish mother into a better way of thinking.  Kudos for the psychological fight for good this writer built into his movie.  He was trying to rid his viewers of an evil among us.