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It’s time to reconsider the Movie MILF. Codified by Anne Bancroft, satirized by Jennifer Coolidge, outrageously Australianized by Naomi Watts, she is now, in 2024, exploding into the mainstream rom-com, these days as a normie protagonist just going about her life until she’s confronted with the undeniable cock of a man at least one decade her junior. This calendar year alone has seen at least four films about mothers (divorced, widowed, and married) climbing atop a youthful stud, (mostly) within the bounds of the law and (mostly) running off into the sunset, happily ever after: The Idea of You, A Family Affair, Last Summer, and Between the Temples. And the mommy-and-me kink shows no signs of slowing down — in October, Netflix drops the Laura Dern–Liam Hemsworth vehicle Lonely Planet, and a slate of erotic thrillers on the way featuring potential Empowered MILF protagonists includes I Want Your Sex, wherein Olivia Wilde bones Cooper Hoffman, and Babygirl, wherein Nicole Kidman does the very same to Harris Dickinson.
Historically, the MILF has been the object of a film, rarely the subject — or, when she was the subject, she often found herself trapped in a grave drama or punished for her age-defying crimes. To wit: Previous mainstays in the MILF Canon include All that Heaven Allows (the ’50s version: MILF as pariah), The Graduate (the ’70s version: MILF as existential-crisis-generator), American Pie (the ’90s version: MILF as gag), Birth (Kidman is not technically a MILF here, as she does not have biological children, but this is undeniably a movie about fucked-up MILF dynamics), and May December (the anthropocenic, Todd Haynes version: MILF as terrorist). The MILF briefly became something of a cliché in ’80s films like Class, White Palace, and Scene of the Crime, and in 1998, How Stella Got Her Groove Back — arguably the original MILF rom-com — did feature MILF as empowered protagonist, as did movies like Something’s Gotta Give, but neither spawned the hyperspecific genre we’ve got on our hands this year. And then of course, there’s Adore, the 2013 camp-drama classic wherein two best pals consent to boning each other’s hot sons. Adore was roundly mocked in its time, but it ran itself straight off of an Aussie cliff so that these new MILF movies could casually walk down a Silver Lake block with an iced coffee.
So why the abrupt MILF shift into rom-com territory? Is it really just about — as these films’ marketing departments would have you believe — Feminism, specifically by way of subverting the ancient age-gap-relationship trope featuring older men and younger women? Or are these movies quietly reinforcing the norms they seek to critique by acting like it’s inherently irreverent for a woman to date below her age group, or impossible to write a 40-plus female character who considers herself a vibrant sexual being without making the internal question of her viability into a central plot point? Is it that there are no movie stars being born anymore, so we must start reverse-engineering all of our entertainment to star Anne Hathaway and Nicole Kidman? Are we a motherless nation, abandoned by our institutions and social safety nets, clamoring for collective comfort and diverting that pain into an urgent demand for a classically Freudian sexual scenario? Is there something in the breast milk? Or just in the private-equity stock-prediction PowerPoints? Is this something to do with Drew Barrymore calling Kamala “Mamala”? Is Miranda July implicated, too? What about your mom?
If we can’t quite pinpoint the why, the least we can do is narrow in on the what: What does a modern MILF Movie look like? What are the tropes, the touch points, the themes, the taxonomies, the treasures, the traps? What specific fantasy is being sold to us? What’s fun about it, and what feels false? Why are all of these horny moms thin, white, and rich, and why are all of them getting involved with someone who has an existing relationship with their offspring? Why do they nearly all sigh into a mirror while wearing a baggy clothing item? Is the reality suggested by these films — that people still give a shit about an older woman dating a younger man — reflective of the reality we actually live in? What does the indie version of the MILF Movie do differently? And (evergreen question) why is the French version so specifically fucking weird?
The Urtext New MILF Rom-Com
The Idea of You
Anne Hathaway is the 2024 MILF Canon Blueprint in a Michael Showalter movie about allowing oneself to bravely love a sexy famous boy bander in the wake of a divorce, beneath the suspicious gaze of a precocious teen, and under the surveillance state.
Who is the MILF? Solène, a 40-year-old divorcee who lives in Silver Lake and has thick bangs.
Is she white? Yes.
Is she rich? Absolutely yes, though I do think we’re meant to think of her as less rich than her ex-husband because her house features more dark wood than blazing white and she drives a Subaru.
Does she have a bougie wardrobe, healthy hair, a specifically Hollywood brand of thinness, an ageless face, and the overall essence of someone who has never truly struggled? Yes, she looks and dresses exactly like Anne Hathaway.
Is her house beautiful, but in a sort of anodyne Instagrammable way that makes you inexplicably sad? Actually, her house is a gorgeous L.A. Craftsman that most people would plotz to live in, but it’s presented as quirky — she loves it, but as she explains early on, her richer ex always described it as a “starter house.”
Is she meant to be read as a little prim and repressed? Sort of. She does not want to go to Coachella. But then again, she has very long hair.
Has it been awhile since she’s gotten laid? She has not dated since her now-ex-husband cheated on her a few years ago.
Does she have a more freewheeling best friend who tells her she needs to go out and get fucked? Yes, Tracy, played by Annie Mumolo.
Is she a very successful career woman devoted to her job, perhaps as a way to avoid romantic relationships? Solène owns a contemporary art gallery (the third most common rom-com job). Several characters refer to the gallery as an “inclusive space,” though it’s not clear what that means functionally. When we meet her she is “going camping alone” to “process the last 20 years” of her life.
Despite many traditional markers of success, is she deeply unfulfilled? “What if all I need is [my daughter], my artists, my gallery, and my friends?” she asks Tracy, who looks unconvinced, within the first three minutes of the film.
Is her original husband kinda bad? Her ex-husband cheated on her with a younger woman, left her, and married the younger woman. Within the first five minutes of the movie, he shows up onscreen wearing dog tags and a suede jacket and invites Solène to play pickleball with him and his new wife. Shortly thereafter, he bails on a plan to take their kid to Coachella because he has to oversee a merger, forcing Solène to cancel her heavy camping trip and take a bunch of teens to a music festival for delusional millennials. Later he yells at her for dating a young person even though he did the same thing; the movie and its inhabitants take pains to point out this hypocrisy.
Do men her age suck? She has normal-to-bland interactions with several of her male peers at her 40th birthday party. She is visibly demoralized by this.
Who is her one child? Izzy, a 16-year-old with equally great hair.
Do they have a codependent relationship wherein the MILF sacrifices basically all of her needs out of misplaced guilt? Eventually, yes. Though, at the start, Solène is a Cool Mom who says things like, “Have so much fun; good stupid, not stupid stupid” when sending her daughter off to Coachella, and Izzy is a Cool Girl who inquires thoughtfully about her mother’s happiness. They’re best friends, basically equals; what could go wrong?
Who is her love interest and is he at least a decade younger than her? Hayes Campbell, a 24-year-old leader of a boy band called August Moon.
Is he also white? Yes.
Do they meet by accident in a setting where one of them is trespassing? Solène accidentally uses Hayes’s trailer as a bathroom at Coachella and then accuses him of having a piss kink.
Is she unimpressed by him, which he finds unbelievably hot? Solène is not a “Moonhead” and makes fun of him for needing help getting dressed for his show. Hayes is tired of being One-Dimensionalized by tweens and craves being negged by a real woman (his emotional piss kink).
Is he brutally hot and charming in a way that makes the MILF write him off immediately as a romantic prospect, in part because she mistrusts men and in part because she has low self-worth due to being older than 25? Yes.
But does he ultimately get under her skin by, first of all, just paying genuine attention to her, then revealing secret depths and general disillusionment? He Googles her, finds her inclusive art gallery, shows up, buys all the art in it, then asks her some questions about what art is. She shows him, sorry, one of the craziest paintings I’ve ever seen, and says it is her favorite. I’m not sure if, within the universe of the movie, we’re meant to think the painting is good or her judgment is bad. He reveals he is sick of being a boy bander and dreams of being a singer-songwriter who makes real music. He also reveals he has both daddy and trust issues.
Do those secret depths force the MILF, who also has trust issues, to re-examine strongly held beliefs about dating a younger man — or, to be more specific, any man at all, who might threaten the tenuous emotional equilibrium she has convinced herself she’s finally achieved at great personal cost, which is actually just self-protective fear about being vulnerable because society (but also this film) has told her she is too old to be considered hot and/or truly lovable, despite the fact that she is plainly hot and lovable? Yes!
Does the MILF do something maternal-coded for her love interest? She makes him a sandwich in an apron at her house. He puts his face in her boobs before they kiss.
Does she actually say “I’m too old for you”? She actually says, “I’m too old for you,” right after they kiss. She adds, “I could be your mother.”
Does she actually say, “I can’t do this”? She actually says, “I can’t do this. Because you’re you, and I’m me, and we just don’t fit.”
Do they do it anyway? Of course.
Is it hot? Yes! Anne and Nicholas Galitzine have genuine chemistry and it’s nice to see a woman getting fingered standing up.
But are the offspring and the love interest entangled in some unfortunate way that makes this whole thing genuinely problematic? Izzy has long been a fan of August Moon, and though she’s all but grown out of it now that she’s a high-schooler, she sees Hayes as a nostalgic childhood idea, not a person who could and in fact will fuck her mom.
Is there a falling-in-love montage set to a contemporary pop song in the meantime? A very long, triple-split-screen montage of the two traveling across Europe on Hayes’s world tour is set to one of August Moon’s songs.
Has the MILF Never Been This Happy in Her Life, indicated by her doing something out of character and/or having a screaming orgasm? Solène has a lot of orgasms — good for her! — and at one point she dances around a hotel room to a Wang Chung song.
But is he more vocally into it than she is? He tells her in Europe that he “feels happy for the first time in his life”; he usually “feels numb.”
Is there a younger woman who says something bitchy and throws our MILF into a spiral? A woman who is, as she describes, “in college,” tells Solène that when Hayes dedicated a song to her at Coachella, it was not special, it was a “bit” the band does whenever they meet somebody hot. Solène calls Hayes a “fuckboy” and promptly leaves the world tour.
Does the MILF look disappointedly at herself in the mirror and then put on an outfit that she doesn’t love because she feels like she’s too old to wear what she actually wants? Yes, when she’s trying on bikinis to hang out at the pool with the college girl, she holds her boobs up and frowns at them, then puts on a gigantic ankle-length denim dress and a scarf.
And do most of the people around her also disapprove of the relationship, basically for no other reason than he is younger and she is older? Yes, they get papped and the entire internet is furious about them. (One People headline: “Mommy Issues.” Another, from TMZ: “Her??” An Instagram comment that took me out of the film thanks to its unusual coherence: “aren’t you somebody’s mother? act like it!”) This is when the movie truly stretches the already thin bounds of its fantasy realm; Anne Hathaway is an objectively gorgeous woman, and while the internet is indeed a misogynistic bog, we do live in a reality where Cher is dating a 37-year-old and even the Daily Mail is semi-reasonable about it.
Is the offspring very upset to learn about the love interest? At first, Izzy is mad about Solène lying to her about the relationship, but then she is supportive of the idea of her mom shattering norms. She actually asks, “Is he a feminist?” “Yes,” sobs Solène. Eventually, and as in real life, feminism is thrown out the window because everybody is making fun of Izzy at school. This is enough to derail Hayes and Solène’s relationship for five entire years because Izzy needs her mom to remain celibate while Izzy is at college for some reason.
Does somebody point out that this wouldn’t be happening if the protagonists’ genders were reversed? MANY people do this.
How do they solve for the unholy MILF problem and ultimately Make It Work? At the end of the movie, after Izzy graduates from college, and as Hayes is nearing 30, they get back together and it’s all fine, randomly.
So what, ultimately, is “the idea of you”? This is an interesting question. Solène does not actually care about August Moon or the idea of Hayes. At one point in the film, she tells Hayes that she fell for “the idea of you,” but that’s not actually true, because the idea of him did not exist for her until she peed in his trailer and even then, the idea of him was deeply unappealing to her until she got to know him in real life. Meanwhile, Hayes never had an “idea” of Solène because he did not have an existing paradigm for a 40-year-old Silver Lake art-gallery owner with trust issues and bangs.
The Netflix Rom-Com Version
A Family Affair
Nicole Kidman bones Zac Efron (again), even though he is her daughter’s boss, in Netflix’s latest attempt to convince you that this is how romantic comedies have always felt.
Who is the MILF? Kidman is Brooke Harwood, a 50-something widow with a blonde wig who sits outside on a massive patio looking at the ocean, grasping for meaning, in a sort of Big Little Lies way.
Is she white? Yes.
Is she rich? See: sitting on a massive patio looking at the ocean, grasping for meaning, in Big Little Lies way.
Does she have a bougie wardrobe, healthy hair, a specifically Hollywood brand of thinness, an ageless face, and the overall essence of someone who has never truly struggled? Yes, she looks and dresses exactly like Nicole Kidman.
Is her house beautiful, but in a sort of anodyne Instagrammable way that makes you inexplicably sad? Her house feels like a N*ncy M*yers set that caught on fire and was hastily rebuilt as a Netflix set.
Is she meant to be read as a little prim and repressed? She dresses in a lot of sweaters and business wear and sometimes sweaters over businesswear.
Has it been awhile since she’s gotten laid? Decades. She has not shtupped a single man since her husband died.
Does she have a more freewheeling best friend who tells her she needs to go out and get fucked? Her ertswhile mother-in-law and editor, Kathy Bates, is the person who encourages her to go out and fuck. “No great tryst ever started by someone being rational,” she says.
Is she a very successful career woman devoted to her job, perhaps as a way to avoid romantic relationships? She is a very established and respected author who also sometimes “writes assignments for Vogue when she can’t finish a book” and gets paid in haute couture. Will pause here for all journalists to take a deep breath.
Despite many traditional markers of success, is she deeply unfulfilled? “I feel irrelevant. Do you feel irrelevant?” she asks Kathy Bates in an early scene.
Is her original husband kinda bad? Though she tries to sell Charlie (RIP) hard as a Good Guy, he was also a writer, but a less successful one than her — huge red flag — and they were going to get divorced before he died of cancer.
Do men her age suck? They are not even mentioned as an option for Brooke, so, yes.
Who is her one child? Zara, a grating, self-involved 20-something played by Joey King.
Do they have a codependent relationship wherein the MILF sacrifices basically all of her needs out of misplaced guilt? Yes. Zara lives with her mom in her beachside manse, eats her food and complains about it (“Can you make spaghetti and garlic bread instead of this bean thing?”), lends her mom’s Vogue clothes to friends, and berates Brooke for having a life.
Who is her love interest and is he at least a decade younger than her? Zac Efron’s Chris Cole, a very famous actor who is 16 years younger than her and is, destabilizingly, in some scenes played as a broad satire of a famous person who abuses his assistant (who is, of course, Zara), and in others as a gentle misunderstood soul who … abuses his assistant because he’s insecure?
Is he also white? Yes.
Do they meet by accident in a setting where one of them is trespassing? Looking for Zara, Chris trespasses into Brooke’s house while she is cleaning in an oversize Blondie T-shirt; she nearly whacks him with some kind of decorative art object and they end up getting drunk and hooking up.
Is she unimpressed by him, which he finds unbelievably hot? He asks her if she knows Margot Robbie, due to being Australian; she says no, he says, “I do,” and she shrugs. Nobody asks her if she has seen Adore??
Is he brutally hot and charming in a way that makes the MILF write him off immediately as a romantic prospect, in part because she mistrusts men and in part because she has low self-worth due to being older than 25? He asks stuff like, “You’re a writer? A real writer?” and tells her she “smells so good”; she apparently finds this charming but, yes, also writes him off due to him being so Zac Efron-y.
But does he ultimately get under her skin by, first of all, just paying genuine attention to her, then revealing secret depths and general disillusionment? After asking her if she is a “real writer,” then asking her (four minutes after they meet) what he should do with his entire career, he reveals that he wants more for himself as an artist than superhero drivel, the boyband career track of movie stardom. They finally bond at minute five, when he reveals his brother is dead. “There seems to be more to him,” Brooke later says to Zara.
Do those secret depths force the MILF, who also has trust issues, to re-examine strongly held beliefs about dating a younger man — or, to be more specific, any man at all, who might threaten the tenuous emotional equilibrium she has convinced herself she’s finally achieved at great personal cost, which is actually just self-protective fear about being vulnerable because society (but also this film) has told her she is too old to be considered hot and/or truly lovable, despite the fact that she is plainly hot and lovable? Yes!
Does the MILF do something maternal-coded for her love interest? She brings him chips. She pours him tequila (cool mom). She consults on his bad script. She gives him allegorical advice about life … something about ships and islands.
Does she actually say “I’m too old for you”? Not explicitly.
Does she actually say, “I can’t do this”? Over and over again, because “he is a movie star.”
Do they do it anyway? Of course.
Is it hot? I say this with deep love for these two leads: no. They had much hotter chemistry when Nicole peed on Zac in The Paperboy.
But are the offspring and the love interest entangled in some unfortunate way that makes this whole thing genuinely problematic? Yes, Zara is at first Chris’s long-suffering assistant, then he fires her, turning them into enemies. When she stumbles upon him and her mother hooking up, she behaves like she has been shot.
Is there a falling-in-love montage set to a contemporary pop song in the meantime? They fall in love during a montage on the New York movie set at a Hollywood studio, set to a pop song I’ve never heard before. A subsequent montage involves a lot of beach walking and sweaters.
Has the MILF Never Been This Happy in Her Life, indicated by her doing something out of character and/or having a screaming orgasm? She lets him rip off her wrap dress from Nordstrom. She puts on a top hat.
But is he more vocally into it than she is? He tells her he has been “waiting for you forever,” though he does admit that this is a line from a script. “I mean it this time,” he adds.
Is there a younger woman who says something bitchy and throws our MILF into a spiral? Her own exhausting flesh-and-blood daughter, for the entire goddamn movie.
Does the MILF look disappointedly at herself in the mirror and then put on an outfit that she doesn’t love because she feels like she’s too old to wear what she actually wants? Yes, while trying on some of her racy couture for her first real date with Chris, she frowns at herself and stands there in a tank top and granny panties for a while.
And do most of the people around her also disapprove, basically for no other reason than he is younger and she is older? Nope, just her shitty daughter.
Is the offspring very upset to learn about the love interest? She throws at least 14 repetitive, insanely childish tantrums over the course of the movie; her last tantrum breaks them up.
Does somebody point out that this wouldn’t be happening if the protagonists’ genders were reversed? No, and I am frankly stunned that Netflix didn’t chomp down endlessly on that low-hanging fruit. I guess people (algorithms) can change.
How do they solve for the unholy MILF problem and ultimately Make It Work? Kathy Bates tells Zara to get a grip on herself. “Be a grown-up, and if you can’t, fake it,” she says. They all have a nice, tacky, Netflix-ass Christmas together, complete with fake snow and the streamer’s de rigueur, flattened “cabin in the woods” set. Zara doesn’t immediately get a grip and tries to sabotage the relationship again. But eventually she does get a grip and everyone lives happily ever after (with Zara working at CAA).
So what, ultimately, is “a family affair”? The title is not really a pun because unfortunately, the entire family does not enter some kind of incestuous polycule, which would make for a much more interesting version of this movie.
The Psychosexual French Version
Last Summer
The French can never just do something normal; there always has to be something extra insane going on. Accordingly, their version of the 2024 MILF film is actually a horror movie, a deliberately provocative, captivating erotic drama from Catherine Breillat about a woman who has sex with her teenage stepson after he moves in with her and her husband.
Who is the MILF? Anne, a late-40s/early-50s mother of twins with a sharp blonde bob.
Is she white? Yes.
Is she rich? “Why didn’t Daddy take you riding?” rich. Two homes, one of which is a chalet, rich.
Does she have a bougie wardrobe, healthy hair, a specifically Hollywood brand of thinness, an ageless face, and the overall essence of someone who has never truly struggled? Yes.
Is her house beautiful, but in a sort of anodyne Instagrammable way that makes you inexplicably sad? No, her house is very French-countryside beautiful.
Is she meant to be read as a little prim and repressed? She wears a lot of demure oatmeal separates and sheath dresses.
Has it been awhile since she’s gotten laid? She and her husband, Pierre, do have sex but she doesn’t orgasm and spends most of the time talking about a 33-year-old man she was sexually attracted to as a 14-year-old, and whom she imagined as being a “pre-corpse.”
Does she have a more freewheeling best friend who tells her she needs to go out and get fucked? Anne’s best friend is her sister, who complains about men and is openly jealous of Anne’s quiet-luxury life.
Is she a very successful career woman devoted to her job, perhaps as a way to avoid romantic relationships? Anne is a respected lawyer who defends sexual-assault victims; dramatic-irony alert.
Despite many traditional markers of success, is she deeply unfulfilled? She drinks a lot of wine in the daytime, yes. She’s also deeply self-sabotaging and in one scene describes what she calls her “vertigo theory” — not a fear of falling, but a fear of the impulse to fall, which ultimately causes one to jump (fuck their stepson).
Is her original husband kinda bad? Pierre is a mediocre movie husband, which is to say he is wealthy and patient but shitty when provoked (the provocation here is that she has mounted his teenage son).
Do men her age suck? They’re boring and clueless, but she is the problem here, low-key.
Who is her one child? She’s adopted twin girls, and they’re adorable. She does, however, only have one stepson, who, in the French version of this cinematic trope, fulfills both the “problematic codependent child” and “younger lover” roles.
Do they have a codependent relationship wherein the MILF sacrifices basically all of her needs out of misplaced guilt? You could absolutely say that.
Who is her love interest and is he at least a decade younger than her? Théo, a recently arrested “problem child” who punched his teacher, is 17 and spends his days “gaming and watching stuff.”
Is he also white? Yes.
Do they meet by accident in a setting where one of them is trespassing? In an early scene, Théo stages a fake break-in at her country mansion.
Is she unimpressed by him, which he finds unbelievably hot? She resents him for messing up her orderly life and unfortunately both seem to get off on that.
Is he brutally hot and charming in a way that makes the MILF write him off immediately as a romantic prospect, in part because she mistrusts men and in part because she has low self-worth due to being older than 25? She writes him off initially as a romantic prospect because he is her stepson.
But does he ultimately get under her skin by, first of all, just paying genuine attention to her, then revealing secret depths and general disillusionment? He doesn’t need to do all that; he’s mostly just shirtless.
Do those secret depths force the MILF, who also has trust issues, to re-examine strongly held beliefs about dating a younger man — or, to be more specific, any man at all, who might threaten the tenuous emotional equilibrium she has convinced herself she’s finally achieved at great personal cost, which is actually just self-protective fear about being vulnerable because society (but also this film) has told her she is too old to be considered hot and/or truly lovable, despite the fact that she is plainly hot and lovable? No, this one is just sort of your standard Oedipal fuckshow.
Does the MILF do something maternal-coded for her love interest? Yes, because she is his stepmom.
Does she actually say “I’m too old for you”? This is hardly the biggest problem they face.
Does she actually say, “I can’t do this”? She says, “Théo, we must never do this again.”
Do they do it (again) anyway? Yeah.
Is it hot? The sex accomplishes what it sets out to do, which is to be fascinatingly grotesque by design, but also to indicate that Anne is seriously sexually unfulfilled otherwise.
But are the offspring and the love interest entangled in some unfortunate way that makes this whole thing genuinely problematic? They are the same person :(
Is there a falling-in-love montage set to a contemporary pop song in the meantime? They have a brief, anxiety-fueled “honeymoon period” of laying in the grass flirting and trying to have a quickie at the twins’ birthday party, where they are promptly discovered by Anne’s horrified sister.
Has the MILF Never Been This Happy in Her Life, indicated by her doing something out of character and/or having a screaming orgasm? She has several orgasms. And I do think everyone in her life finds it out of character for her to be fucking her stepson.
But is he more vocally into it than she is? Yes, he won’t let her end it and starts to threaten her.
Is there a younger woman who says something bitchy and throws our MILF into a spiral? A younger love interest of Théo’s calls her “ma’am.” Anne’s sister freezes her out entirely when she finds out about Théo.
Does the MILF look disappointedly at herself in the mirror and then put on an outfit that she doesn’t love because she feels like she’s too old to wear what she actually wants? Not in this one, no.
And do most of the people around her also disapprove, basically for no other reason than he is younger and she is older? There is a significantly better reason for the disapproval.
Is the offspring also very upset to learn about the love interest? This question consumes itself like an ouroboros.
Does somebody point out that this wouldn’t be happening if the protagonists’ genders were reversed? No, but it would certainly be a lot more normalized in a French movie, which is saying something.
How do they solve for the unholy MILF problem and ultimately Make It Work? He tattles on her and she perjures herself and life goes on, Frenchly.
So what, ultimately, is “last summer”? I’m assuming the fictional events of this film took place last summer, but it’s also the last summer that this character can ever say, “I did not fuck my stepson.”
The Indie Rom-Com Version
Between the Temples
A widowed, depressed cantor (Jason Schwartzman) takes on his grade-school music teacher (Carol Kane) as a bat-mitzvah student and things get beautifully weird in Nathan Silver’s latest, which is the most true-to-life, most Jewish, most deliciously uncomfortable, most Harold-and-Maude-esque and least trope-y of the four films in question.
Who is the MILF? Carla Kessler, an eccentric 70-something widower, mother, and grandmother living in upstate New York.
Is she white? Yes.
Is she rich? She is certainly not Hathaway or Kidman or French rich, but she owns a lovely home and does not seem to worry about money.
Does she have a bougie wardrobe, healthy hair, a specifically Hollywood brand of thinness, an ageless face, and the overall essence of someone who has never truly struggled? Carla is beautiful in a refreshing, real, Carol Kane way. She is a vivid free spirit, not a Goop head.
Is her house beautiful, but in a sort of anodyne Instagram way that makes you inexplicably sad? Her house is quirky and full of ephemera, including an album she recorded in the ’70s called, amazingly, You’ll Live.
Is she meant to be read as a little prim and repressed? Carla defies the MILF-movie stereotypes in almost every way. She is not repressed; she is outspoken and in fact slightly unhinged.
Has it been awhile since she’s gotten laid? Possibly not since her husband’s death, though it’s unclear.
Does she have a more freewheeling best friend who tells her she needs to go out and get fucked? She is her own freewheeling “go get fucked” best friend, but she does have another friend who makes her some psychedelic tea in the middle of the day.
Is she a very successful career woman devoted to her job, perhaps as a way to avoid romantic relationships? She worked as a music teacher for 42 years “until they kicked me out of there last summer, fuckers.”
Despite many traditional markers of success, is she deeply unfulfilled? Carla seems relatively fulfilled, except for the fact that she has not been bat mitzvah’d. “I always wanted to do it,” she explains to a confused Ben.
Is her original husband kinda bad? He “didn’t believe in” her getting bat mitzvah’d, so she didn’t pursue it until he smoked himself to death.
Do men her age suck? It’s more that the women his age suck. Ben goes on several Jdates with women who can’t hold a candle to Carla’s strange, whimsical demeanor. One of them, his boss’s daughter, is a direct doppelgänger of his dead wife, but still fails to hold his attention.
Who is her one child? Nat, a shrink and father of two who is so annoying, like all of these children.
Do they have a codependent relationship wherein the MILF sacrifices basically all of her needs out of misplaced guilt? Matt, a controlling weirdo, won’t let his mom order vodka at dinner, belittles her when she tells him she’s getting bat-mitzvah’d, and is generally a schmuck. She doesn’t speak up for herself when he treats her this way.
Who is her love interest and is he at least a decade younger than her? Ben Gottlieb, Carla’s erstwhile student who is now in his 40s. He is the film’s protagonist and a mama’s boy (with two moms) who’s just finished a long sabbatical after losing his wife. When we meet him, he’s forgotten how to sing; this threatens his job security.
Is he also white? Yes.
Do they meet by accident in a setting where one of them is trespassing? They do meet by accident, at a karaoke bar, after Ben gets punched in the face for antagonizing a stranger. She helps him up and they quickly realize she used to be his teacher.
Is she unimpressed by him, which he finds unbelievably hot? Carla takes to Ben immediately as a sort of surrogate son. He’s less immediately impressed by her, which feels more realistic and less patronizing.
Is he brutally hot and charming in a way that makes the MILF write him off immediately as a romantic prospect, in part because she mistrusts men and in part because she has low self-worth due to being older than 25? Ben is neither brutally hot nor charming, which makes him incidentally even more charming to Carla.
But does he ultimately get under her skin by, first of all, just paying genuine attention to her, then revealing secret depths and general disillusionment? Ben, whose beloved wife slipped and fell on the ice, sometimes lays down in traffic. He is described as the “saddest motherfucker” in the local bar, where he chugs mudslides. “Even my name is in the past tense,” he says to his rabbi. Carla does find this all quite captivating, though not in an overtly sexual way at first. He endears himself to her by repeating a story she’s told him, word for word, at her behest.
Do those secret depths force the MILF, who also has trust issues, to re-examine strongly held beliefs about dating a younger man — or, to be more specific, any man at all, who might threaten the tenuous emotional equilibrium she has convinced herself she’s finally achieved at great personal cost, which is actually just self-protective fear about being vulnerable because society (but also this film) has told her she is too old to be considered hot and/or truly lovable, despite the fact that she is plainly hot and lovable? Ben is actually the more emotionally unavailable, freaked-out, self-protective party — until he falls in love with her.
Does the MILF do something maternal-coded for her love interest? Carla’s entire dynamic with Ben is maternal: picking him up off the bar floor, driving him home, making him tea, coaching him back into being able to sing, and putting him to bed in her house in her son’s pajamas.
Does she actually say “I’m too old for you”? Not in a romantic sense — this movie is too smart for that — but early on, she accuses him of thinking she is too old to be bat mitzvah’d. “You think I lost my brains!” (He actually says, “I think you got old and lost your brains.”)
Does she actually say, “I can’t do this”? She says, “I didn’t survive three minor strokes for you to say no. Get your balls back.”
Do they do it anyway? This relationship, which is not clarified as romantic until the end of the film, actually goes unconsummated onscreen, at least in the technical sense. However, Carla’s bat mitzvah ultimately operates as a sort of sensual release for both parties.
Is it hot? Of course, it’s Carol Kane!
But are the offspring and the love interest entangled in some unfortunate way that makes this whole thing genuinely problematic? Ben and Nat went to high school together; this fact really only bothers Nat.
Is there a falling-in-love montage set to a contemporary pop song in the meantime? Zero montages in this one. They do start to fall in love over non-kosher cheeseburgers, scored by a jaunty piano tune, and several Torah-studying sessions.
Has the MILF Never Been This Happy in Her Life, indicated by her doing something out of character and/or having a screaming orgasm? Nobody audibly orgasms, but Ben does come out of his depressive fog when they drink drugged tea and watch Ben’s bar-mitzvah video, after which he hallucinates a conversation with his younger self.
But is he more vocally into it than she is? By the end of the film, Ben is professing his eternal love for Carla, who’s initially freaked out by it but ultimately seems to come around.
Is there a younger woman who says something bitchy and throws our MILF into a spiral? Carla has far too much chutzpah to be thrown by a younger woman, though many around her do try to throw her off her game.
And do most of the people around her also disapprove, basically for no other reason than he is younger and she is older? Nearly everyone in Ben’s family is alarmed when Ben professes his love for Carla over Shabbat dinner during a game of telephone. One of his moms accuses her of “grooming him in school.” The other asks if he’s happy. His late wife’s doppelgänger/would-be love interest laugh-sobs.
Is the offspring also very upset to learn about the love interest? Nat, who describes himself as “anti-anti-Semitic,” is haunted by Ben wearing his pajamas and sleeping at his mother’s house. He kicks Ben out of a family dinner and Carla allows it. “I’m confused,” she later says.
Does somebody point out that this wouldn’t be happening if the protagonists’ genders were reversed? Blessedly, nobody in this film is that chronically online.
How do they solve for the unholy MILF problem and ultimately Make It Work? Ben chases Carla home across town, falls, and concusses himself. Carla rescues him and asks him to perform her bat mitzvah.
What is, ultimately, “between the temples”? This is a pun about the pressure cooker that is the human brain and also Judaism.