This fall Thurman’s main point of business will be promoting Motherhood, an independent film opening in October that she describes as a “little love project.” The story follows a single fraught day in the life of a New York mother of two and blogger as she prepares for her daughter’s birthday party, enters a writing contest, navigates playground politics and clashes with her best friend (played by Minnie Driver). Along the way, she wonders whether she has lost her identity in the course of parenting. The film, by writer-director Katherine Dieckmann, was shot last spring in downtown Manhattan on a shoestring budget of about $5 million. “Everything was bare-bones,” says Thurman. “We even shot a little of it in Katherine’s apartment. It was the most truly guerrilla independent filmmaking I have done, I think, ever.”
A vanity project it is not. Thurman’s character, Eliza Welch, spends much of the day in a shapeless dress, her hair disheveled, a toddler strapped to her back. Although she doesn’t scavenge her kids’ leftovers, she does take a swig from her son’s sippy cup. There are no sex scenes, glamour moments or high-speed car chases. There are, however, several shots of Thurman typing on her computer, accompanied by her voice-over—think Sex and the City without the sex or the shoes. “I took the script with me on a night flight to England, thinking I’d read just a little bit of it, but I just fell in love with the writing. I was screaming out loud laughing,” says Thurman. “It was so real and so honest about how hard it is to be a mother and also a full person who’s true to herself. It was like seeing five years of my life.”
While Thurman, unlike her character, wasn’t exactly hauling her kids up several flights of stairs to a cramped apartment, she was, she notes, as emotionally overwhelmed as any other mom. Motherhood, she says, “captures so much of the joy and frustration and the weird tension between your old self and your new self. And the loneliness of parenting, too. I’m a single mother and certainly have been for quite a few years. Even though the character in this piece has a husband, it’s also about how she and he aren’t connecting.”
Neither groundbreaking nor overflowing with mass appeal, the movie isn’t exactly Pulp Fiction, but Thurman isn’t pretending otherwise. “I find this movie to be very deep, but for other people, it misses them entirely,” she admits. And did anyone close to her suggest she pass on the role and wait for something bigger, considering her recent string of less than blockbuster releases? “Well, there is sort of a general opinion of that kind,” she says tartly. “But I got into a place a couple years ago where I wanted to work in a way that had some kind of meaning for me. Otherwise it wasn’t time I wanted to take away from being home. So this was kind of perfect. I couldn’t stand the idea of being on a set in New Mexico, pretending to, like, detonate a nuclear bomb.”
