Mrs. Doubtfire is a bedtime story for divorcees
"Just because they don't love each other doesn't mean that they don't love you."
Mrs. Doubtfire, which we recently watched over the course of three nights because that’s just the way it is now, is in many ways the consummate 1990s adolescent kid’s movie. It checks many of the boxes: It’s got Robin Williams, it’s got goofy cross-dressing, it’s set in San Francisco, it’s got Mara Wilson, it’s got a pee joke, it has rare but striking instances of foul language, like sprigs of senescent rosemary tucked into a pork roast. Most youth-oriented movies in the 90s had at least three of these elements; in particular San Francisco served as the backdrop of so much of the zeitgeist of the time, in some ways supplanting New York City as the consummate American pop culture urban center. This was before the city’s population became about 90% homeless and there was poop and vomit everywhere.
Oh, and Mrs. Doubtfire has divorce. That was a big part of 90s movies. The U.S. was coming off of a couple decades of no-fault divorce law and filmmakers were eager to reckon with the chaos and misery wrought by that new paradigm. Mrs. Doubtfire was about divorce; so was The First Wives Club, and Bye Bye Love, and Hope Floats, all iconic 90s movies with divorce at the center of them. The latter films are movies for adults, of course, but Mrs. Doubtfire was geared toward kids, as was the 1998 reboot of The Parent Trap (“Divorce doesn’t carry the stigma it once did,” the Los Angeles Times dryly noted), and Man of the House in 1995. The Santa Clause was also about divorce, kind of indirectly, as was Tim Allen’s other big cinema hit of the decade, Jungle 2 Jungle, about a man who discovers his divorced wife has been hiding the existence of their son for 13 years.
Divorce was kind of a big deal in the 90s, though ultimately the Times had it right: It had lost most of its cultural stigma and instead become kind of just another thing that you do. That’s how it’s portrayed in Mrs. Doubtfire: The main characters’ divorce is more or less just sort of a plot point, something to get the action moving so that we can see Robin Williams in falsies and a tartan maxi-skirt.
Indeed the impetus for the film’s divorce is preposterous: The matriarch of the movie, Miranda, decides to divorce her husband Daniel because he’s rather immature and whimsical and struggles to keep his acting jobs. Apparently Miranda would often shoulder unfair chore burdens: Sometimes when she got home early to spend time with the kids, for instance, “the house would be wrecked and I'd have to clean it up.” The final straw is when her husband throws a raucous birthday party for their teenage son after she said he wasn’t allowed to have one. QED, she wants a divorce. She rejects even the pretense of marriage counseling and heads straight to circuit court.
I hope I don’t have to stress how outrageously inappropriate this whole outcome is. I mean there’s no doubt that this is a strained marriage and that the husband needs to grow up a bit and put away his portfolio of childish behaviors. Leaving messes for your spouse to clean up is rude. The parents need to agree on rules for their children and both be committed to enforcing those rules. All stipulated. But, um, is that it? Is all of this grounds for divorce? Other than an inaptly goofy and at times eccentric father, this family seems to have it all: A mansion in downtown San Francisco, three very well-adjusted children, two supportive parents who plainly adore their children, everyone’s healthy and stable and in good shape. The kids idolize and love their father and plainly relish his attention and affection, which he gives them in abundance, sometimes imperfectly but more than well enough. The idea that this family will be improved by divorce in any way is just laughable. It defies credulity, it slips the surly bonds of credibility and veers straight into fantasy.
Yet the divorce happens anyway, and Daniel—who it must be stressed appears to be a deeply involved and affectionate father who really does seem to take good care of his children—is given about nine hours of visitation rights, one day per week, a cruel and inexplicably spiteful court decision that Miranda accepts with no dissent whatsoever. Thus the film’s rising action, in which the protagonist disguises himself as a Scottish nursemaid and babysits his own children incognito and sets his fake titties on fire.
Mrs. Doubtfire, in other words, mostly treats divorce rather playfully, as just another potential element in a family’s wending and varied history instead of the acutely chaotic and profoundly immiserating force of destruction it almost always is. Divorce’s effects have been known for decades; it was certainly known in 1993. One literature review in 2014 found that divorce “diminish[es] a child's future competence in all areas of life;” it cited a 1991 survey that proved children of divorce “score significantly lower on measures of academic achievement, conduct, psychological adjustment, self-concept, and social relations.”
None of this is demonstrated in Mrs. Doubtfire, where the children mostly seem to suffer virtually no ill effects in transitioning from seeing their father every day to seeing him for an afternoon once a week. They appear at times unhappy and discomfited by the divorce, to be sure, but their suffering is essentially rendered as an afterthought, as if some low-rent dramaturg did about three minutes’ worth of research on how divorce affects the children who are subject to it. “This is all my fault,” Daniel’s son laments as his father is cast from their home; his anguish and doubt is quickly smoothed over by his father and it’s not mentioned again. In reality children of divorce often struggle for years with that kind of piercing and brutal self-doubt and self-flagellation, repeatedly shouldering the practical burden of the divorce and placing its onus squarely on themselves. “We only get to [see you] once a week,” his daughter complains later. “That's not very much.” Not very much! To go from seeing your beloved father every day to seeing him once every seven days is not “not very much,” it’s a debilitating implosion of a child’s entire world, the sort of thing than is statistically likely to lead to maladaptive behavior, addiction, crime, and dysfunction at a macro level, to say nothing of depression and aggression and other psychological comorbidities.
You can’t make a comedy movie while reckoning with that kind of catastrophe, of course. But that’s the point: Divorce isn’t a comedy, not even a comedy-drama. It is what Peter Kreeft calls “the suicide of the family,” and as Bridget Phetasy noted last month, it “never ends” and “will affect your kids for the rest of their lives.” You can only sell that kind of horror to mass audiences if you make it look pretty—if you gussy it up as a screwball slapsticker with some gay side characters and far too many jokes about Pierce Brosnan’s genitals.
Mrs. Doubtfire, then, is essentially a bedtime story that divorcees might tell themselves, a way to smooth over the stinging pain of failure that divorce ultimately represents. “Some parents get along much better when they don't live together,” the movie lectures. “They don't fight all the time and they can become better people.” This is a love letter to divorce itself; it oversells the difficulties of marital strife and undersells the chaotic misery of divorce, letting parents off the hook while throwing children under the bus at the same time.
To its shallow credit, the movie does not end on a pat note; the parents do not get back together but stay separated, as is overwhelmingly the case. But even in that context it is glib and insincere: In the end the mother grandly reveals to her children that their father will now be permitted to see them “for a few hours every day after school,” and everyone just seems so happy about that, as if this represents anything more than a wet band-aid on a bullet hole. Mrs. Doubtfire ends with the father and his children happily driving off into the adventures of a San Francisco afternoon; but of course he’ll drop them off at home in “a few hours” and then leave, and then he’ll do the same thing the next day, indefinitely—until the parents have another fight, maybe, or one of them gets remarried and moves away, or the kids grow tired of this bifurcated arrangement, or something else falls apart. This is what very often what happens. Divorce is rarely necessary and always awful; even the powers of a saccharine 1990s Robin Williams comedy can’t cover it up.