YMMV / Stepmom

• Informed Wrongness: Ben wanders off while Isabel is shooting in Central Park. He's found safe by park police, but Jackie is absolutely livid. She goes so far as to threaten to take Luke to court to amend their custody agreement so Isabel won't be left unsupervised with the children. This is seen as a gross overreaction, but anyone who's actually been to Central Park might have a different reaction. Ben goes missing from Belvedere Castle and is found at the Central Park Zoo. They're about 15 blocks from each other, which would take an adult walking at a normal pace 20-30 minutes. Never mind that they're nearly on opposite sides of the park from each other and there is no direct route within the park; it's designed to be windy. Oh, and Ben is about six years old. At minimum, this means that Isabel didn't check on him for over an hour while she had sole responsibility for him. In New York City. It would have been weirder if Jackie hadn't had such a strong response.
• Narm:
  • Isabelle and Anna searching for Ben when he got lost in Central Park is supposed to be a dramatic scene, but the former's screechy yell of "BEEEENN!!!" kind of kills its seriousness.
  • Luke keeps Anna in the room by shouting "you don't walk out on your mother" and she responds with an incredibly dramatic "no, that's what you do!" in a delivery akin to the infamous "I learned it from watching YOU" PSA from the 80s.
• Narm Charm: The "Ain't No Mountain" sequence should be corny, but is very cute.
• Retroactive Recognition: One of Jena Malone's child actress roles before her more famous turns in Pride & Prejudice (2005), Sucker Punch, The Hunger Games, Donnie Darko etc.
• Values Dissonance: Isabel's plan for Anna to get back at her "ex boyfriend" involves her giving him a "The Reason You Suck" Speech about what a loser he is and how he doesn't know how to please a woman, before claiming she's going out with a highschool boy and kissing a model from Isabel's job. That might have passed for acceptable in the 90's, but encouraging a twelve-year-old girl to criticise her classmate for not knowing what a "snowjob" is and being inexperienced, then kiss a much older boy and have her classmates believe she's actually dating him comes off as quite squicky now, since Anna is too young to understand the full implications of what she's doing. Jackie is framed as being a Control Freak by blowing up at Isabel over this, but she's right that it was totally inappropriate and a cheap way of solving Anna's problem.

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