"Despicable Me 2" - Minions Need Moms

"Monsters University" is nearly gone from theaters, nobody wanted to see "Turbo," and I was not going to pay full price for tickets to "Planes" or "Smurfs 2." So what option did that leave me for taking the younger cousins out to see a cartoon feature this weekend? "Despicable Me 2."

I want to spend this post looking at the movie's mixed messages about parenthood and family, some of which are a little troubling. This is not a proper review of the movie, but I'll give you a short, spoiler-free one up front. I liked the original, and the sequel is a clear step down, pushing Gru (Steve Carrell) and his girls into a formula rom-com, that occasionally remembers the main characters are supposed to be foiling a mysterious villain and saving the world. Fortunately the little yellow minions get a lot of screen time, and they're plenty of fun. I'm glad they'll be ditching Gru entirely for their own movie in the near future. All in all, "Despicable Me 2" is a pretty slapdash, though well-intentioned venture, and I couldn't help spending most of the running time thinking of ways that PIXAR or Dreamworks could have done the whole thing better. But the kids liked it, so I certainly feel no animosity toward the movie's existence.

Spoilers ahead.

Now let's talk about motherhood. I was kind of tickled at first to discover that "Despicable Me 2" really is a romantic-comedy through and through. Gru is partnered up with secret agent Lucy Wilde (Kristen Wiig) to bring down a villain they have tracked down to a local mall. Gru and Lucy connect, Gru finally works up the courage to ask her out, and at the end of the movie we see them get married, and Lucy happily become the girls' new mother. The whole movie is pushing the superiority of the traditional nuclear family pretty hard. Many children's films are guilty of this, but in "Despicable Me 2," it's especially obvious because of how simple and formulaic the plotting is. At one point Lucy, on her way to a new job in Australia, has the sudden epiphany that she's in love with Gru. She's so smitten that jumps out of the airplane she's in mid-flight, shouting "I choose Gru!" and hang-glides her way back to where she left him. This happens, despite Lucy showing no real romantic interest for Gru up until that point, and barely meeting his adopted daughters Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier), and Agnes (Elsie Fisher).

Some of this can be chalked up to bad plotting and bad storytelling, but it's still telling that the movie purposely skips over all the complicated parts that happen in real life. It doesn't bother to ask the most fundamental questions. Does Lucy want to be a mother? Will becoming one impact her plans to be a great secret agent, a job she's very, very passionate about? Do the girls get along with her? Do they mind that she occupies so much of Gru's attention? Does the prospect of a new mother bring up any issues they might have with losing their birth parents? All of these questions might have been brought up and addressed offscreen - the movie suggests that the courtship is not a quick one - but expanding a family is not a matter to be taken lightly, and the movie may be giving the wrong impression to younger viewers. "Despicable Me 2" simply isn't ready to deal with something so emotionally complicated, so it gives us the perfect fairy-tale rom-com version. Lucy is accepted immediately by the girls, and expresses no qualms about changing her whole life to become part of Gru's. And they all lived happily ever after. The End.

Another issue I've seen others bring up is that the ease of Lucy's integration into the family makes one-parent households seem inferior. I can see this, as single mothers are pretty common in fiction, but single fathers get married off as quickly as possible. Still, I think this is mitigated to some extent by the movie showing that Gru is an excellent single dad. He's willing to do just about anything to make the girls happy, including dressing up as a fairy princess for Agnes's birthday party. However, he's not willing to pursue women simply to find a mother for the girls. This is made clear by the running subplot involving a nosy neighbor, Jillian (Nasim Pedrad), who keeps trying to set Gru up on terrible dates. As for the girls, the older two don't express any interest in having a mother, though Margo tries to set Gru up for online dating. It's only the youngest, Agnes, after being given the contrived assignment to deliver a Mother's Day speech (by the most insensitive teacher ever), who awkwardly points out that she doesn't have a Mom, and then latches on to Lucy at first sight.

But this is just a kids' cartoon, you might say. It's all a fantasy. Yes, but that didn't stop "Brave" from tackling thorny mother-daughter issues, or "Incredibles" from addressing the struggles of being special, or "Up" from giving us a heartrending picture of loss and regret. "Despicable Me 2" could have been so much more meaningful and more interesting if it had just tried a little harder and took itself more seriously. I wouldn't say that its messages rise to the level of being bad or harmful in any way, nothing that a hundred other pieces of media haven't done in the past, but it because it tries to play it safe, it does end up perpetuating some worrisome ideas.

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