The Many Moms of Patricia Clarkson
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Photograph copyright Focus Features.One Day (2011)
In One Day, based on David Nicholls’ bestselling novel, Clarkson plays Alison, mother to the loutish Dexter (Jim Sturgess), one of the film’s two central lovebirds. In the novel, Alison is sexy, frank, magnetic—everything we’ve come to expect from a Clarkson Mom. Here’s how Nicholls describes her when we first meet her:"At her frequent parties, if Dexter sat very quietly so as not to be sent to bed, he would watch as the men formed an obedient, devoted circle around her; intelligent, accomplished men, doctors and lawyers and people who spoke on the radio, reduced to moony teenage boys. He would watch as she danced to early Roxy Music albums, a cocktail glass in her hand, woozy and self-contained as the other wives looked on, dumpy and slow-witted in comparison. School-friends too, even the cool complicated ones, would turn into cartoons around Alison Mayhew, flirting with her while she flirted back, engaging her in water fights, complimenting her on her terrible cooking—the violently scrambled eggs, the black pepper that was ash from a cigarette."
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Photograph by Adam Taylor, © CTMG, Inc.Easy A (2010)
In this film loosely based on The Scarlet Letter, Clarkson plays Rosemary, mom to high-schooler Olive, played by Emma Stone. This is Clarkson at her painfully-hip-mom best: When Olive admits over dinner that she landed in the principal’s office for using a bad word in class, but is reluctant to say the word in front of her younger brother, Rosemary urges her gleefully, “Spell it with your peas!” In another scene, Rosemary, thinking that Olive is dating a gay boy, assures her daughter that “your father and I are totally supportive. We love you no matter what the sexual orientation of your opposite sex sex partner.” -
Photograph by David Giesbrecht – © 2011 CTMG, Inc.Friends with Benefits (2011)
A Clarkson Mom is a sex-positive mom. “Whoa! I don’t know what you’re doing, I can’t see you putting on your black underpants,” says her Friends with Benefits character, Lorna, closing her eyes after she walks in on Dylan (Justin Timberlake) and her daughter, Jamie (Mila Kunis), in bed. When the two divulge that they’re just friends and not officially dating, former groupie Lorna is thrilled. “Ooohh, it’s like the ’70s in here!” Then she asks Dylan if Jamie is just his “slam-piece” before going off in search of some gin.Lorna is “a mother who’s definitely challenged in the mother department,” Clarkson explained recently. “She’s had a lot of men in the back of a lot of tour buses. And she’s had a lot of backstage passes. She’s had quite a life.”
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Photograph copyright NBC.“Motherlover” (2009)
In this raunchy, NSFW music video from the comedy group Lonely Island, the New Jack Swingers from “Dick in a Box” (played by her Friends with Benefits costar Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg) declare that they will honor Mother’s Day by having sex with each other’s moms (played by Clarkson and Susan Sarandon). Don’t let Clarkson’s demure, long-sleeved nightgown fool you: This is a woman with grown-woman needs.
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Photograph copyright Sony Pictures Classics.All the Real Girls (2003)
Twenty-something Paul (Paul Schneider) has slept with most of the girls in his small southern town, yet he still lives with his mom, Elvira (Clarkson), who works as a clown entertaining kids at the local hospital. While Clarkson provided delicious comic relief in Easy A and Friends with Benefits, in All the Real Girls, she experiments with the melancholy mother role. And, perhaps, with something else as well—as Slate’s Dana Stevens wrote of the “tragically forlorn” Elvira’s odd relationship with her son, "Are Paul's vaguely incestuous grapplings with mom meant to explain his failure to commit … to any girls?" -
Photograph copyright IFC Films.The Safety of Objects (2003)
In this film, Clarkson plays the mom as angry, bitter divorcée. Her character, Annette Jennings, is burdened by a comatose former lover and an ex-husband who’s left her in a precarious financial situation: He hasn’t sent her a check in three months, and as a result, she can’t afford to send her older daughter Sam (a prepubescent Kristen Stewart) to summer camp or to pay for a special school for her disabled younger daughter. “I’m sorry about camp, we just couldn’t afford it,” she tells Sam at the beginning of the movie. “You couldn’t afford it,” Sam mutters under her breath. “That’s right, I couldn’t afford it, I’m a crappy mom, does that make you feel better?” Clarkson asks, exasperated.
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Photograph copyright Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.Pieces of April (2003)
Clarkson was nominated for an Oscar for playing Joy Burns, a prickly suburban mother who’s dying of breast cancer. The film centers on a disastrous Thanksgiving dinner that Joy's punky, black-sheep daughter April (Katie Holmes) is hosting for her family in her shabby Lower East Side walk-up. Joy is just fine with the arrangement: "This way," she says, "we get to show up, experience the disaster that is her life, smile through it, and before you know it, we're on our way back home." Joy is such a pill, even her own mother doesn't seem to like her much. -
Photograph copyright Metro Goldwyn Mayer.Carrie (2002)
In this 2002 television remake of the Brian De Palma classic, Clarkson put her stamp on one of pop culture’s most notoriously awful mothers: unhinged, sin-obsessed Margaret White, who thinks her daughter is the devil’s spawn and celebrates Carrie’s first period with a trip to “the praying closet.” Critics felt, however, that Clarkson’s Margaret was too mild and serene to live up to to Piper Laurie’s iconic, “operatic wacko” from the ’70s version—which is fine by us; we like our Clarkson Moms good-natured and blowsy, anyhow.