The Parent Trap 2: The Parent Trapening

The Parent Trap 1998 (rewatch): Because if you're gonna rewatch one movie, you may as well rewatch two...


Differences:

• They established the parental romance very well as a QE2 Whirlwind Romance. If this was not a children's movie, it would have been a "we fucked on a cruise ship and oops, babies" situation rather than "we totally got married before the sex happened, totally".



• They wrote off the grandmother presumably for not adding much to the story. In exchange, they promoted the butler to a side character and gave him more screen time and importance than the grandmother had, plus a romance. The grandfather role is somewhat diminished as well. Instead of deciphering a telegram and waiting to eavesdrop on a 3AM phone call, he just... follows Hallie-as-Annie out of the house and confronts her outside a phone box. They really could have cut the grandfather from the film and had the mother or Martin go after Hallie.



• The twins are younger and clearly pre-pubescent. Meanwhile the first shot of Annie is of her shoes, then her legs, and moves up her outfit as she gets out of a car. Sigh.



• Hallie, the designated-tomboy, has shoulder-length hair instead of Susan's short hair.



• Instead of the butler presumably driving Sharon to a camp in New England from Boston, Martin the butler explicitly has flown with Annie from London to then get a fancy taxi and drop her off at camp and then immediately fly back to London (since buses are shown at the beginning and Hallie comes from California, this camp has buses to pick up the kids from the airport, thus making Annie's entrance even more unnecessarily elaborate.) Hallie-as-Annie then goes back to the airport in a fancy taxi instead of the buses. The James family is too good for public transit.



• Lindsey Lohan is much better at accent work than Hayley Mills was, whose accent went all over the place (I do not know how good Lohan's British accent is, I just know it's *consistent*)



• Both girls have pictures of their other parent, instead of just Susan/Hallie having seen a photo in the past. Sharon showed Susan a glamor shot of the mom and Susan recognized it, I'm not clear on it Susan had seen that glamor shot specifically or another picture (my impression of that scene was they used the dad's and the mom's actors's headshots for those photos). Annie and Hallie's "picture of the other parent" is just one single picture, torn in half. Which is good for Drama Purposes, but it leads to many questions, such as did the parents only ever have one picture of their ex? Why did they rip their one picture in half and keep the half-photo of their ex? "Ah, yes, I got divorced. This is my ex. You can see that the picture is torn in half. Rather than cutting my ex out of all my photos and keeping the half that has me in it, I kept the half that has my ex and gave away the part that has me in it. I did this so I could give it to my daughter. No, she's not a twin."



• The ear piercing scene. This is just an entire hallmark of every single kids and teen book I read, so yeah, totally normal, have one kid pierce another's ears with an ice cube and a needle they sterilize with a match, this is a normal rite of passage. Did this trope continue? Do the YA books these days continue this nonsense? This was just the most normal tropey thing to me. It does lead to a question of where Hallie and Annie got a needle, but in both movies, the isolation cabin has pots and pans to catch rain water leaking through the ceiling, so this falls under "don't question it". Annie's family has no concern over Hallie-as-Annie getting her ears pierced in dubious sanitary conditions at camp, because they also read the same books I did as a kid and are like "infections don't exist". (The first time I got my ears pierced, it was done at a jewelry store and I got an infection. Get your ears pierced by professional piercers, people.)



• The twins have explicit plans for their switch: one is gonna figure out how the parents got together, the other is gonna figure out why they broke up. Compare to Sharon and Susan, whose entire plan was "remind them of how they felt on their first date".



• The mom does not need to be convinced through Asking About The Birds And The Bees subterfuge to spend the day with Hallie-as-Annie. Instead, mom has to go in to work for a moment, offers to bring Hallie with her, Hallie is happy to go, and mom includes her in it, Hallie has a great time being brought into work, and then they just hang out the rest of the day. There is some stuff to unpack here behind this change, I got a bit rambly about it, but essentially: the mom is now a rich single mother with a career, but the plot goes out of its way to be like "she's still a great mom even though she has her career, and she manages to make both of them work, by bringing the kid to work (even though the grandfather could have provided childcare for the clearly-5-minutes it took to fix a veil problem with the solution of "put the veil higher by putting a hat beneath it"), and then hanging out with her the rest of the day. She is Good Mom."
  
  The switch to the mom being a wedding dress designer leads to some improved writing, because Hallie also therefore has the opportunity to be a lot more smooth to bring up the question of matrimony: instead of "and now for something completely different", it flows naturally from "hey mom, you design wedding dresses, let's talk about marriage".



• In the original, we had mirroring in the scenes of Sharon and Susan grilling their parents and both parents giving them The Sex Talk. Susan-as-Sharon pulls it into a discussion of her dad and gets Mom talking about the first date. Sharon-as-Susan and the Dad have a confusion pileup because Dad wants to talk about Vicky, Sharon wants to talk about her mom, and it descends into Dad thinking he needs to give the sex talk right here and now, and then it becomes more pushing Sharon into accepting the marriage to Vicky.
  
  The remake basically cuts the Sharon and Dad bit into only being about the upcoming marriage. Annie-as-Hallie (I would like to say just once that I keep typing that as "Allie" and maybe that will be enough so that I *stop doing it*) tries to divert the Dad into talking about Mom while Dad is in the process of telling her about Meredith. We then run into Meredith (the point where they'd run into Vicky was after the sex talk confusion bit). Then we see Annie and Dad horseback riding, Dad starts to tell her he's marrying Meredith, Annie goes galloping off in anger, and that's when Chessie figures out she's Annie. Dad and Annie never talk about mom. Their father-daughter bonding time is "surprise, I'm getting married in two weeks".
  
  BTW, in case it is not explicitly clear (it is explicitly clear), I judge these dads A Lot for the really crappy way they handle the whole "telling your daughter about your upcoming wedding" thing. Their reaction to "my daughter hates my fiancee" seems to be ignoring it. Susan and Hallie mention their dad being their best friend, being able to talk to him about anything, etc etc. That is not shown.



• Both the mom and Meredith have careers. They both seem to be their own bosses and have clients: the mom with the wedding dresses, and Meredith seems to run a PR company and takes the dad on as a client (it does not seem to me that Nick hired Meredith as a PR manager in a sense that she's his employee.) We see just about the same amount of time of both of them doing their jobs.



• Annie, having to put up with having her hair cut and her ears pierced, gets herself back by telling her dad that she's gonna stop biting her nails (since, by god, Hallie could make her cut her hair and pierce her ears but biting the nails is not something Annie has to put up with!). This was one thing I'd thought actually happened in the original, not the remake. Except we do not see Hallie tell Annie about the nail biting. So I guess I'd collapsed the nail biting information from the original with the "horrid habit" from the remake.



• Annie gets a better reason to dislike Meredith from the start: she seems kinda maybe-okay with it and then Chessie says Meredith is only interested in the dad for his money, then she meets Meredith and sees Meredith lie on a phone call with a Reverend. So her instant dislike is a lot more "this woman isn't good enough for my dad" rather than "only my mom is good enough for my dad".



• The dad remains not the greatest dad. The mom, however, is a much better mother. This, unfortunately, leads to a problem not present in the original: I do not believe this mother would Do The Thing. Okay, so let's say you and your fuckbuddy on an ocean liner have a very nice fuckbuddy time together and then you're like, oh hey, pregnant. And they clearly tried to make it work, including that Chessie was there when the twins were born. And then... this mother decided to walk away from one of her daughters forever. No. I don't believe she would do that. And if she did do that, I cannot believe she would not be wracked by guilt and do everything she could to undo it and fix it by, at most, several months later.
  
  Actual line: "I haven't seen or heard from Nick Parker in over eleven years and suddenly I'm flying halfway across the world to-- I'm not mature enough for this. If the man didn't make me so nuts, I'd still be married to him. I mean, we came up with this arrangement so that we'd never have to see each other again."
  
  Sorry, no. Characterization not established that she would do that to her kid. Again, to flog the point, the "arrangement" they came up with was splitting the twins, never admitting to the twins that they did that, and each parent never seeing the other kid again. All because the parents don't want to see each other again. You don't get there because your ex makes you "nuts". You get there by a combination of shallowness and also really really hating your ex, so much so that that arrangement sounds like a good idea, and then you don't decide that whole things sucks until your other daughter is in front of you and you're like "whoops, guess I shouldn't have done that". It takes that long to get to the whoops?



• Characterization that does make sense: the mom said she was on the QE2 because she hates flying. When she has to fly from London to San Francisco, she has flight stress on top of stress about seeing Nick again. She gets extraordinarily drunk.



• I found Meredith on the whole somewhat more sympathetic than Vicky was. I mean, she's worse than Vicky was in every way, but there's a throwaway line where she's talking to her dad and says Nick's everything her dad ever wanted for his little girl, plus millions more, and I was like "how many times did her dad tell her that the most important thing for her would be to marry rich?"
  
  (I feel the escalation of Meredith being worse was to justify the twins being so much worse to her in the camping trip. They easily could have drowned Meredith. But what's a little murder when you're trying to get your dad to listen to you and not marry someone?)



• Mom is sensible. "We don't want Dad and Meredith to get married and the only way we can figure out how to do that is to have you marry Dad instead," suggest the twins. "LOL nope," says the mom. She has nothing in common with the dad anymore except the kids. She's not gonna break up this relationship where Dad has happily moved on.



• Something I find pretty interesting in how it relates to the Dad's characterization: Meredith has heard of Elizabeth James Famous Wedding Gown Designer, enough that when she meets an "Elizabeth James", she goes immediately to "this is fate! please make my wedding gown!". She does not know that Nick was married to an Elizabeth James, let alone that it's the same person. Nick has been dating her for, max, 8 weeks, but 8 weeks is assuredly long enough to say "I have a daughter named Hallie, my ex-wife Elizabeth James isn't in the picture in terms of shared custody." Nick seemingly did not have this conversation in way that named his ex-wife by her full name. (Side question: does *Hallie* know her mom's full name, because if so, I'd be here for the AU where Hallie sees a wedding dress and contacts her mom and says "hi! you may not remember me! but you gave birth to me! Can you come to california? I can make you some chili!) (Also again the omerta around the fact that the girls are twins extends to not telling Meredith. One wonders if anyone new to their lives since the birth knows that the girls are twins. I didn't get a handle on if Martin had known Hallie existed and I don't know at what point he met the mom. Again, if Meredith hadn't been marrying Nick just for the money, "I found out my fiance's daughter was actually a twin two weeks before the wedding" would be kinda a red flag... At least in the remake, it's 2 weeks instead of 2 days.)



• The first time the dad sees the mom again, the mom is fully dressed. I appreciate this change. She also gets to do first aid on the dad after the dad gets a cut on his eyebrow while falling into the pool, instead of because she just punched him. The mutual sexual attraction between the two of them is much more apparent. The date is also much more clear from the beginning that it's explicitly trying to recreate the first date so they'll fall in love again. "It's so sweet," says the mom, who knows the twins are deliberately trying to sabotage the dad's relationship. The dad, whose relationship is being attempted to be sabotaged, does not disagree. Um.



• The film gets around the question of "what were the reasons for divorce, because remember, we need them to get over the reasons within less than 30 minutes, so they have to be very very minor, and nothing at all that would have the parents going nuclear which they, in fact, did" by having Nick say it's "all a bit hazy" for him now. The reasons for the divorce are never elucidated, they skip right to "congrats to both of us on achieving our career dreams" (new in the remake, since the original, I didn't get the impression that Mitch hadn't always been a rancher, but in this case Nick bought a vineyard and Elizabeth became a famous designer. Same as the original, they both seem to have been wealthy independent of that; vineyards cost money, and my impression from the grandfather and the London house is that the James family has tons of money.)
  
  Nick brings up location issues as reasons the custody agreement (not the divorce): they split the kids because international shared-custody plans are annoying. Ignoring that at the time they divorced, Nick did not own a vineyard (so no specified hard ties to a specific location) and Elizabeth was an artist. They could have made shared-custody work. And Elizabeth is like "no, idiot, we split the kids because we didn't want to see each other again". Nick does a wasn't-me, and then Elizabeth also pulls out the "hazy" line. We are not gonna ever rehash the reasons for the divorce. There's only 30 minutes left in this movie and we still need to go camping.
  
  The actual reason we get for Elizabeth moving out: "Oh, Nick, we were so young and we both had tempers, we said stupid things, and so I packed. Got on my very first 747 and... you didn't come after me."
  
  Nick: "I didn't know that you wanted me to."
  
  To belabor the point: that is something that makes sense in a breakup-reconciliation fic tagged "misunderstandings" and that probably calls the characters idiots in the summary. YOU SPLIT UP TWINS AND MAINTAINED AN ELABORATE FICTION THAT YOU NEVER HAD A SECOND CHILD.
  
  Also, we haven't seen much of either of them with having that bad a temper. That was one thing the original did well.
  
  Overall, we get an impression that Nick is sentimental (he tracked down the wine at their quickie wedding on the QE2 and has it in his basement; meanwhile the mom doesn't even remember what that wine was) and that he might still be in love with her. But again, this is all well and good-- except for the main underlying plot point of this film. Neither characterization passes the Would This Person Do That test. Also, why was Nick gonna marry Meredith? He'd hired her to do PR for the vineyard and then ended up engaged and then, when she stalked off, seemed totally fine with it and said that he'll have to thank the girls later for doing it. The way he treats Meredith when they're engaged and then turns on a dime and shrugs it all off... I do not like it, Sam I Am. Did you care for her at all, Nick? Is your heart broken? Do you give any fucks at all? Like, he doesn't even seem mad when she shows her true hatred toward the girls (he also never seemed that concerned either that the girls outright hate her), he's just "okay fine, I pick the girls, good bye" and just grins and brushes off the whole situation. That part of him, that specific part, makes him seem like a guy who would either decide, or go along with a decision, to split up twins for good and brush it off his shoulder and be happy with the twin he has, happily single-parenting his way to turning his wine hobby into a wine business. The rest of him does not match that.
  
  But, like, Nick, dude, if you were in love with your ex and you wanted to see her again... are we meant to believe that the split plan was entirely Elizabeth's idea and Nick just went along with it? Because I do not get that impression but, yet, the inability for the movie to explain why they broke up and why they made that decision, except to have it be specifically Elizabeth who was angry enough to leave (and threw a hairdryer at his head, in a nod to the original), and show Nick nearly kiss her in their first scene together, seems like it's trying to give the impression that Nick never stopped loving her and Elizabeth was the bad guy. Nothing else at all supports that conclusion. Nothing else explains why they did this.
  
  By never examining the reasons for divorce, I have no reason to believe those reasons were resolved and that they won't recur immediately. However, while I wouldn't give Mitch and Maggie more than a couple months, Nick and Elizabeth might last a year? Seems like they did last time around.
  
  Because the thing is, for all that they say they're gonna re-decide the custody agreement so the twins stay together, they don't. They talk briefly about switching 6 months, but decide it's unworkable, and they don't have a good solution. They don't seem to be under actual legitimate time pressure. No one's like "we have to get Annie back to London because school's about to start". There's no reason they couldn't have all stayed together until they came up with a new agreement, especially once Nick's wedding is called off. No, instead the mom and Annie are to go back to London, because, after all, they came there to switch the twins back. If Elizabeth had to go back to London, they could have left both kids in California or she could have taken both kids with her. They couldn't decide on a new custody agreement and so their decision was "we'll keep the twins split up, but we'll reunite them on holidays". The parents decide that rather than have both kids some of the time and no kids some of the time, they'll each have one kid all the time, except for, like, 10 days a year when the kids get to be together. They decided that keeping the twins together was too complicated because they both wanted to see the kids, so they'd ignore what the kids want (to say together) in exchange for what the parents want (to parent one child, ignoring how the child feels about this). The twins, not liking this, try one last ditch effort and try to force them all to go on a camping trip together as one last chance to rekindle the romance, but then the mom is like "I don't care about our agreement" and leaves them to go with Vicky/Meredith instead of her. No forced family time for the mom. No family camping trip for the twins. And then one twin is gonna leave and they don't know when's the next time one of their parents will put them on an airplane so they can see their sister.
  
  Making the hard decisions as responsible adults so our kids don't have to be separated is too hard, says the parents. The only way to fix the custody agreement is to have the parents be together, says the movie. Okay, we'll have the parents be together, says the movie. Yay, says the twins. This is not gonna last, says me.
  
  Oh, all right, since this is the differences section: in the original, the mom and dad reunite in the kitchen and then boom, happily ever after. In this one, they part and Elizabeth and Annie go back to London, where Nick and Hallie are already there to meet them at the house, having caught an airplane that goes faster. The family has all had a wonderful discovery that airplanes go both ways and that reuniting is possible, yay, how nice.
  
  Anyway, to sum up: I'd fully believe in their reconciliation of the characterization-as-shown if there wasn't the premise of the film (aka characterization-as-told) to consider.

Important Similarities (other than, y'know, the entire plot):

• Hallie is a budding lesbian. Susan had also given me that vibe. Hallie even gets to metaphorically come out of the closet in front of her family when she goes inside one to talk to Annie. She comes out and they're all looking at her. I felt this was a Metaphor On Purpose :P



• Hallie has an important stuffed animal that comes with her to London. (Missed opportunity to have someone, anyone, in California notice that "Hallie" "lost" her important stuffed animal at camp and doesn't seem upset about it.)



• Annie-as-Hallie is met on the tarmac in California by her dad, instead of inside the airport. (Hallie-as-Annie is met in the lobby of the airport, not even baggage claim, by Martin The Butler.)



• Annie-as-Hallie goes horseback riding with Dad, like Sharon-as-Susan had. However, I find a little less plausible for Annie to have had riding lessons than Sharon to have. I don't actually know how likely it was that Annie would have had riding lessons, but I feel it's not as likely as Sharon, where I did not doubt at all that that character would have had riding lessons at some point. (The real question was why Susan never had piano lessons, since there's a piano in the house. She can play the guitar, maybe she tried the piano and hated it).



• Yet again, the housekeeper character is the one who figures out the switch and she does it the day after it happens. No one else figures it out on their own.



• The twins lose all distinguishing personalities once they switch places. It's one character, played by one actor, in two roles, and that role is "cute twin playing matchmaker".



• Like the first movie where I got confused as to which twin was named Susan and which was named Sharon (the California one is Susan, the Boston one is Sharon), I got confused at which was named Annie and which was named Hallie. (Annie is London, Hallie is California).

...I kinda feel like next on the rewatch should be Pollyanna, of which I have indelible memories of specific scenes but I do not think I could tell you what the plot is, beyond "cheerful orphan girl comes to town". ...As an aside, how many "orphan girl comes to town" stories are there? was this a specific thing? because there's Pollyanna and there's Anne of Green Gables and I'm not well versed in this era of fiction but I feel like if there were two prominent ones, there must have been a lot more of them. Wiki tells me Pollyanna was 1913 and Anne of Green Gables was 1908. What was going on then specifically that this was the Literary Thing To Do, if it was, in fact, the Literary Thing To Do? Like, all the kids books of my childhood have kids having leukemia and getting kidnapped by their noncustodial parent or just kidnapped in general (it turns out there are two Face On The Milk Carton books I never read! Looks like they came out in 2012 and 2013, which, erm, explains why I didn't know of their existence). Was the big scare of ~1910 having to do with orphans? Or is it just an easy plot device?



This entry was originally posted at https://lannamichaels.dreamwidth.org/1098856.html.