In a 2018 post on Instagram, Jennifer Garner appears in a red jumpsuit, dangling from a T-bar as it slowly lifts her above a large aluminum slide in some upscale indoor playplace. “Oh, I wish I hadn’t done this,” she mutters to her onlooking family. “I hate this so much. Why’d I do this?” Though she may have some misgivings about the zany position she’s in, Garner soon loosens her grip and, with a deep breath of composure, slips down onto a cushioned landing pad. It’s a pretty anticlimactic resolution for what turned out to be a very low-stakes situation, not really meriting the emotional playing-up the movie star gives it. This anodyne revelry provides the basis for the new film Yes Day, and as good a summation of its general vibe as one could hope to find.
Actor, producer, and supermom Garner observes an annual holiday known as Yes Day, originated in a 2009 children’s book and treated here like a phenomenon sweeping America. For 24 hours, parents acquiesce to their kids’ most whimsical and messy requests, the idea being that having this outlet for their rambunctious energies will make youngsters better behaved for the other 364 days of the year. (It’s crucial that anything dangerous or illegal is barred, because as several Twitterers have already noted, the movie basically operates under Purge logic.) But in this loose adaptation of Garner’s real-life hijinks, courtesy of screenwriter Justin Malen and director Miguel Arteta, Mom and Dad have a thing or two to gain from the experience as well.
In fact, the whole anything-goes enterprise seems to be mostly for the grown-ups’ benefit. Affluent SoCal working stiffs Carlos (Edgar Ramirez) and Allison (Garner) used to be nonstop thrill-seekers, skydiving and eating spicy foods with all caution blowing in the wind behind them. But the responsibilities of adult life—Carlos is a workaholic lawyer, Allison fills her days keeping her reckless offspring’s brains inside their uncracked skulls—have made fun-squelchers of them both. The windows-down car wash, water-balloon Capture The Flag game, and diarrhea-inducing dessert feast don’t just offer a chance for the kids to go hog wild. These antics also enable a pair of grown-up grumpuses to get back in touch with their inner grade-schooler. For Allison, forced to play the bad guy while aloof Carlos remains the affable good cop when he’s around, it’s a chance to prove to herself that she’s still got it.
The difficult negotiations of childrearing might have been a fine subtext—something to occupy the attention of parents in the audience—for a comedy so unmistakably family-oriented in tone. But in Yes Day, that element of the story is less of a side dish served for a more mature palate than the whole entrée. Allison and Carlos’ unruly kids, each more annoying than the last, get a single trait apiece: 14-year-old Kate (Jenna Ortega) wants to go to a music festival, middle son Nando (Julian Lerner) likes science, and littlest Ellie (Everly Carganilla) is loud. They learn nothing beyond a newfound appreciation and respect for their elders, the deadest giveaway of all that however juvenile its ’tude, this project was conceived with harried fortysomethings in mind.
It’s tricky to predict how well it will nonetheless play with real live youths in need of fresh content to fill the endless spans of quarantine downtime. Presumably they’ll appreciate the cameo appearance from H.E.R., explicitly introduced as Big With The Kids These Days. It’s less likely that they, or anyone, will get a chuckle out of cheeky Nando mugging for the camera and shouting, “I love the smell of Kool-Aid in the morning!” The film’s only hope for establishing some common intergenerational ground lies with the comic secret weapons popping in for a scene here and there. If everyone’s going to come together in enjoyment of anything, it’ll probably be Nat Faxon as an awkward tater tot fetishist or Fortune Feimster as a slightly overzealous EMT.
For Arteta, this is a sad pivot from the roiling sexual dysfunction of his recent Duck Butter back to the dismal fluff of the Garner-starring Alexander And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. The primary creative auteur here probably isn’t the director but his star. Garner’s made “perfectly imperfect mom” a key part of her public brand in recent years, from sitting as a board member on child welfare nonprofit Save The Children USA to advocating for celeb-family protections against paparazzi to cofounding an organic baby food company. With that in mind, the most interesting way to process this otherwise unremarkable confection is as her most direct statement on the tribulations of motherhood. All sprinkles and no ice cream, it at least offers a rose-tinted window into the pathology of a woman who spent years going above and beyond as a caretaker, both for her children and a husband in need.
46 Comments
AV Club interview with Garner soon to follow.
Ahahahaha, one of this place’s finest traditions.
I’m waiting for the 25 page slideshow on the cars of Yes Day on Jalopnik.
Savage Love: We all Need a ‘Yes Day’ for our Repressed Sexual Urges
I’m surprised Savage Love hasn’t jumped on the impending arrival ot “sex-crazed cicadas”.
“Yes Day’s Jennifer Garner talks about her favorite diarrhea-inducing dessert feast”
‘Is Yes Day a sandwich?’
That’s a firm no.It’s plump too.Mmm-hmm
the movie basically operates under Purge logic.
Coming Summer 2022: Purge Kids
Kids on the beat!Kids on the street!Beat kids! Beat kids!
Directed by Robert Rodriguez.
If only we could…..
You know we’d all watch the fuck out of that movie, Modusoperandi.
What if your kid’s wish is for you to commit massive tax fraud though?
Donal Trump Jr.’s been a grown-ass man for several decades now.
Does HE know that?He doesn’t act like he does….
I have noticed that with very few exceptions Jennifer Garner fills her post Alias days with bad kids movies. I guess that’s her thing now. It could be worse I guess.
I just want her to jump over a canal in heels, kill some terrorists and steal a medieval encryption device again….
Eddie Murphy spent a decade making terrible comedies opposite himself, but he still had a Dolemite in him.
Not everybody has to be Streep or Pacino (and even their records are hardly unimpeachable). It’s not my thing, but I’m with you in not caring.
Likely very family-friendly sets, and decent hours because of child labour laws? Probably not a bad way of getting a decent work-life balance and spending time with her own kids.
My hope is that she makes a 13 Going on (x) every ten years.EDIT (after looking up when she made 13 Going On 30): every twenty?
I saw that the other day. It was way better than it had any right to be. I expected just a gender swapped Big but it was better than that. 4/5 stars
It’s Hollywood. She aged out of sexy, so all that’s left is moms. Or playing the boss to some doctors/lawyers/cops on TV.
She made Peppermint a few years ago. I haven’t seen it but it looked to be a sexy spy thriller
In what world is a C a “firm no”?
It’s Charles Bramesco. Riverdale broke his brain.
Do you the writers of the AV Club know what a “C” is?
The big, blue, wobbly thing that mermaids live in?
The thing Spongebob lives in a pineapple under?
Club?
As an Aussie, I’d make the only appropriate joke, but the Yanks still seem to think that joke is gendered.
Australia only has one joke that isn’t inappropriate? Yup, that tracks.*sips tea from the good china*
My life, my love, and my lady?
Why did this get a C? The review makes it sound like a D- max…
The fact that the way to appeal to the kids is by a cameo from fucking H.E.R. is just *chef’s kiss*
W.H.O.?
The trailer makes it look like a fun kids movie for 12 year-olds, mostly girls. One might argue that if it appealed to a 30 year old blogger, even an educated and practiced movie reviewer, it might not be the same kind of film.
This movie seems to be directed specifically toward people who would like this movie. Why would you, someone who doesn’t like this movie, bother reviewing it?
When my oldest was young, I’d take her to the local video rental store where there were literally thousands of movies, but she would insist on renting mostly the same titles over and over. Some of these were okay and I’d often break down to buy her her own copy, but I considered a lot of them crap and as a forty-something father, I couldn’t watch them all the way through and would give them bad reviews.Yes Day looks like fluff that was produced for a streaming service. Its equivalent may be all of the holiday movies they produce for the Hallmark Channel. I’m sure no one ever expected it to be a work of art. It’s just a fun family movie a tween might watch or a parent might stream with their kids. There are also a lot of movies for grown-ups released every month on the streaming services and the majority of them are not reviewed by anyone from the AVClub, why this one? It does not appear targeted toward the audience for this site.
If you read the review, you’ll see that one of the criticisms is that it seems targeted more at parents than children.
As this is based on real-life hijinks from Garner’s life, I guess that’s why this couple don’t have a nanny.
3 seconds into this trailer my response was oh hell no. “Yes day” is absoutely the nadir of shitty parenting. I’m convinced it only exists for social media influencers, all of whom I hate. Nothing about this is funny or appealing.
I read this as “confounding an organic baby food company” and upon realising my mistake felt a deep well of sadness that I’d never get to hear the story behind that misread sentence.
“It’s crucial that anything dangerous or illegal is barred … The windows-down car wash”You know, I’ve never gone through a car wash with the windows down, and it could be a perfectly safe thing to do, but “This could be perfectly safe for all I know” is the sort of attitude that gets us Gorilla Glue Girl. Or widespread adulteration of wine with diethylene glycol. Maybe it’s presented more responsibly than I’m imagining, but the I don’t think it’s a good idea to teach children that it’s “fun” to use things in ways that they quite clearly were not intended to be used. The world is not a playground. There is such thing as an adult world full of things of things that are very useful but very dangerous.And again, the issue is not whether window-down car washes in general are a good idea. The issue is the general principle of using things for things they aren’t meant for. And can you imagine if your parent *did* choke to death on car wash foam, and you had to go through the rest of your life knowing that you “forced” them to do it?More generally, the premise of this movie is absurd. If the children’s suggestions are perfectly safe and nonharmful, why do you need a special day to follow them? Why are you spending 364 days of the year just ignoring your children’s wants? And if there are good reasons to not do them the other 364 days, why do they suddenly not apply on this day?
It’s a cute fun movie, slightly odd to see it reviewed like it’s trying to be Spielberg.
In reality, Yes Day would just consist of the kids playing Among Us sans screen time limits.