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One could argue, of course, that the movie perpetuates old stereotypes about women - women who are alone struggle and must look for solace in men. I would say that an adaptation of a divorcing mother who then remarries without love is modern for its time.

The strongest point about the movie, of course, is the quintessential, not really unanswerable question about motherhood - how long could or should a mother go to protect her child? Mildred, of course, tries to protect her ungrateful daughter, the true culprit behind the murder of Mildred’s second husband, from prison. It is to no avail in this case, but the point remains: is that the ultimate sacrifice a mother could make? To break with morality and sacrifice her own life in the meanwhile?

I tend to shy away from foreign movies on the list, but the brilliant Korean film from 2009, Mother, explores this theme, arguably first exposed in film by Mildred Pierce. There, a mother investigates a murder that has been pinned on her son. Should the mother believe the son and/or seek to exonerate him regardless of guilt?

I will leave it at that for now because, as we shall see, we have not heard the last of mothers facing this choice.

2. Terms of Endearment (1983)

The Best Picture winner of 1983 is, unlike the discard Ordinary People, really about the relationship between a mother and her daughter.

While many movies, including last year’s Mia Madre and James White, explore the sadness that comes with losing one’s mother to old age or illness, it is relatively rarer the movie that explores a mother’s grief and anguish as the experiences the loss of a child. But Shirley MacLaine does this brilliantly, also in an Oscar winning turn, in Terms of Endearment.

Widowed and in late middle age, Aurora is a devoted mother to Emma, played by a stunning Debra Winger. Emma is all Aurora has and is devoted to, until Emma marries against her wishes a man who is clearly not good for her. At a temporary loss, Aurora devotes her life to dating her next door neighborhood, until Emma, divorced, returns to upset the apple cart - both with her personality and with the terminal illness that will consume them.

The movie is deeply emotional but not manipulatively so. The acting is stupendous, from Winger to MacLaine and Jack Nicholson, Aurora’s love interest in another Academy Award-winning role. And the story gives us precisely what we want in a movie that belongs on this list - motherly sacrifice, motherly suffering, and motherly understanding. Aurora is unflappably loyal and forgiving of her daughter. That is what mothers do.

What mothers do not normally do, of course, to bury their children. But this mother has to face that horrendous task, and the resulting emotional scarring will not soon be forgotten by any viewer of this beautiful film.

1. We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

But if you thought Mildred Pierce had it hard, then We Need to Talk About Kevin.

Criminally snubbed for her brilliant performance in this dark, dark tale, Tilda Swinton plays the suffering mother of a young boy who gives her trouble from the start. Literally.

From difficulties during her pregnancy and childbirth, Swinton’s character knows that there is something inherently wrong with Kevin. Oh, it’s not the trite and superficial story of Damian the anti-Christ. It is not Alien or even the story of the savior, like the mother in Terminator. It is simply the story of a bad, perhaps even evil seed, and how a woman grows to realize it - and what she does about it.

At every step, the old notions of motherhood in movies are tested - Kevin makes it harder and harder for Eva, his mother, to love him. But it is his final, his most devastating and most horrific act - done perhaps out of desire to obtain some sort of sick revenge against his mother’s acts of love “against” him - that will shock the viewer, and ultimately break Eva away from the mother you expect her to be in trite, Mildred Pierce movie fashion.

And it does not end there, for the suffering that Kevin inflicts on his mother lasts, naturally, far beyond the “simple” heinous crimes he commits. It scars her both emotionally and socially, almost physically and metaphorically. Because, regardless of whether she forgives the boy or not, regardless of whether she succumbs to the natural impulse to love the child no matter what, the harder, unforgiving question is: can she forgive herself, as a mother?

Happy early Mother’s Day!

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