Note: Spoilers for Mrs. Doubtfire. Also, I may hurt your nostalgia a little bit...
Who is the bad guy in Mrs. Doubtfire? The impression you get is that Robin Williams' character Daniel is the one wronged, but in every way he is the one doing wrong. His ex-wife has moved on, her career is doing well and she is seeing a handsome man who shares her interests and likes her kids. If anyone is wronged here, it is his suffering wife trying to make the best out of a sudden change that, honestly, she should have made a long time ago. But instead, we are placed in Daniel's camp, feeling his need to see his children and feeling, in the end, that what he had done had to be done. In no way is this true, and the film is tone deaf to just who really got hurt and how we should deal with that. Mrs. Doubtfire is extremely confused as to what it wants to say, or how to say it even, often saying competing things at the same time with no sense of cohesion. To be sure, the movie is funny and the performances are charming and far above what you would expect out of a summer family film, but it does little to make up for the incongruences of the script, direction, and characters.
Mrs. Doubtfire follows Robin Williams' Daniel as he finds himself suddenly unemployed and in the middle of a divorce with Sally Field's Miranda. After a judge rightfully tells Daniel he can't have co-guardianship of the kids until he gets a job and an alright apartment, a situation they will readdress in three months, Daniel decides he can't wait that long and goes undercover as the elderly nanny Mrs. Doubtfire in order to be around his kids all day. Hijinks ensue as he tries not to get caught, comes to understand his ex-wife and why she left him, and tries not to get too jealous of her handsome new lover, Pierce Brosnan's Stu. It all goes awry when he attempts to juggle both being the nanny and a job interview for a TV show in the same night, at the same restaurant, at tables mere feet from one another, while getting drunk. After this inevitably fails, a judge considers him not a good judge of character (obviously), and says sorry, but you can't see your kids for the time being. He gets the job playing Mrs. Doubtfire on the TV show he interviewed for (somehow), and watching him in the afternoon with their kids encourages Miranda to reach out to him, apologize that he can no longer see their kids and her part in it, and to attempt to defend her side. The scene ends with Daniel saying he had to do it to see his kids (rather than just waiting three months and reconvening with the judge, remember), and that she basically made him do it. She concedes to letting him babysit the kids after school, and everyone is happy.
Before we dig into this, I want to flesh out the beginning of this movie leading to the divorce, because I actually think it is quite good and in some places contradicts the later film. The movie starts with Daniel in the recording booth, doing voice over work for a cartoon, which gives us a great incite into his personality while letting Robin Williams play. The cartoon scene comes to a point where his character is given a cigarette, and Daniel goes off script moaning about how awful the cigarette is. The producer stops him, and tells him to read the script or get out. Daniel is furious, telling them they are basically marketing cigarettes to kids and how immoral it is, before finally deciding to quit and go home. Daniel has made a moral decision he thinks is best, and quits for his convictions. Good character development for only a single scene. Daniel goes to pick up his kids, and talks his middle child into throwing a birthday party even after his mother explicitly told him he couldn't have one because of his slipping grades. Daniel's response is: "Well, your mother won't be home for four hours." He proceeds to throw a missive party, with farm animals and every kid on the block by the looks of it. Naturally, the cops are called, and they call Miranda, who is furious and storms home to stop them. As Daniel and Miranda clean the mess up, the three kids stand at the landing near the top of the stairs, listening to them fight. Daniel yells at her for being a nag and being no fun, and she screams back that he makes her into the responsible one because he refuses to ever do it. She says she is done with it. Daniel backpedals, says yes, they fight, but come on, they love each other. Sally Field's facial expression as it dawns on her that no, she does not in fact love him, is one of the best parts of this movie. It's extremely expressive with no words, and we see all of their marriage come crashing down in that one look.
In the first few scenes, we've established a few things: Daniel is virtually a fun-loving man-child, great to have around but not terribly responsible. He has intense convictions, and thus far what we've seen is that they are in favor of kids getting their fair treatment - even if his idea of fair treatment comes at the cost of accountability. But, all-in-all, this beginning set up is fine. The whole execution, however, is missing its ending.
Daniel's entire plot to be Mrs. Doubtfire is an insane overcompensation. The judge tells him he doesn't have a job or an apartment, so he can't have his kids. Fair enough. Before he even becomes Mrs. Doubtfire, however, he gets both. It's just a waiting game, but being the man-child he his, he has zero patience when it comes to being able to see his kids again. Daniel's error is he doesn't trust that things will work out in his favor (which it will - Miranda doesn't want him out of their lives, she just doesn't want him in hers, thus not wanting him to babysit them requiring her to see him everyday), and so he decides to go to the extreme. All of this is ridiculous, but it follows what we know about him and gives us a funny point to start with in his arch. The set-up is fine, but it never quite comes into any kind of moral focus, especially since the movie is trying its damnedest to say something moral about your right to see your kids and smothering you with sentimentality. There is no payoff for his character to see repercussions for his mistakes or otherwise even acknowledge he did much wrong. He never learns to be accountable.
We get one semblance of growth from Daniel by the end film (outside of some minor improvements as a father). In the middle of the film, Daniel as Mrs. Doubtfire is talking to Miranda, asking her what went wrong in their marriage. She tells him that she found Daniel funny and unpredictable, but that he never took anything seriously, and that really began to get in the way of her own personal development. If he wouldn't be serious, suddenly she had to be serious for the both of them, and it made her into something far more strict and negative than she ever wanted to be. She was compensating for his shortcomings. At the very end of the film, after the horror of what Daniel did fades a bit, Miranda decides to go see him on set after shooting an episode of his Mrs. Doubtfire children's show. She apologizes for how things were handled in court, but reiterates that he seriously fucked up and what he did was rather deranged. Daniel hits back that he had no choice but to do what he did, because she took his kids from him. In a sense (and I'm stretching a bit here to give Daniel something like an arch) Daniel has finally decided to be serious. He doesn't crack any jokes, he just tells her straight up how he feels. The problem here is that he wasn't forced to do anything. He could have waited out the three months and he would have co-guardianship. Things would have been fine, but he overreacted, and even after the fallout he thinks that he was, underneath it all, in the right. Sure, he does concede in court - after being grilled by a judge for his behavior - that he might have done some things in poor taste, but Christ in no way does this make up for his behavior, or even count for much since he contradicts any kind of acknowledgment of wrongdoing. The fact Miranda caves in at the end and gives him what he wants is such a conflicting message I don't even know what to think. Firstly, of course he should have been nannying his kids after school. I mean, why not? He was available, free, and desperately loves his kids. But as it is framed at the end of the film, he is being rewarded with what he wanted all along, despite what he has done, which is a terrible message. Discussing this movie with friends of mine, it has come up a couple times that this is a family movie and looking too hard into themes is overkill, to which I respond with bullshit. The film itself acknowledges the impressionable quality of children with the scene where Daniel quits. Seeing a cartoon character smoking a cigarette is bad because it influences children, but seeing a grown man disregard his ex-wife's trust and still gets his way doesn't? Kids are especially impressionable when it comes to how they see adults act, and Daniel, being the protagonist, is not only a terrible example for kids, but for adults, and one that doesn't seem to be worth his arch.
Not content to just rag on a movie I feel conflicted on, I have a solution as to how this film could have been improved. Keep the first two thirds of this movie the way it is, up until roughly when Daniel talks to his wife about why she left him. At this point, Daniel should reflect on what he has done up to this point and have that moment-with-a-mirror where he looks at himself and realizes "what the fuck have I done". The remainder of the movie has him trying desperately to get out of the Mrs. Doubtfire job, but due to it seriously screwing over Miranda (it could be that she needs time to work on that project with Stu, which is important to her company), or his youngest daughter's attachment to his character, he finds it difficult to get out of. Here, the joke is that now he can't undo the stupid mistake he is completely aware he has made. When things are revealed in the end, he has long since known he was probably not getting out of this, and has a much better bargaining tool in the end for not being a piece of shit. Finally, he should apologize to Miranda, he should acknowledge his faults, and then I'd be willing to concede the ending we got. It isn't perfect, but it definitely gets a few marks up in my opinion.
Mrs. Doubtfire is such a well acted and funny film, it's honestly a disappointment that the script can't hold its end of the bargain. The set up was good, the characters well realized, but there is only so much you can do to make up for what amounts to one rotten character ruining everything. A better vision and a better third act, and we could be singing a very different tune.
5.0
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