Blythe Danner vs. Sally Field
Battle of the Blowsy, WASPy, Possibly Drunk Moms

It hardly bears repeating, at this late date, that the stream of interesting roles a woman is offered in Hollywood dries up at roughly the same rate, and along roughly the same timeline, as her ovaries. Some of them either made enough money or reaped enough creative fulfillment when they were young and firm that they can't be arsed, in their dotage, to pick up the few meager scraps of acting work that exist for sexagenarians. But for the rest -- who either weren't good savers or still have some adorable ideas about remaining "active" and "vital" in their professional arena -- the one kind of role they can always count on is the messed-up, inappropriate, probably silky-drapey-layers-wearing, possibly drunk or otherwise unwell mother of a priggish adult child who is always censoriously hectoring her. "Mom! You can't sleep with my best friend and think I'll be okay with it!" "Mom! You can't pretend I had a great childhood when you were mentally ill and off your meds!" "Mom! Close your legs!" Is that sort of thing worth postponing retirement for? Only Blythe Danner and Sally Field know for sure.

To be fair: in Field's case, it's possible that she really, honestly, just doesn't know better. Throughout her career -- even going back to her cutest, most successful, most bankable years, she's sort of behaved as though she can't tell the difference between a really excellent project and a total dog. The woman did, after all, start out in the business in her teens, so maybe that engenders, in a performer, an anxiety about failure or insolvency and a willingness just to do whatever you're asked to for the payday. Or not. Hell, we're not psychiatrists. We're just saying that, in the same year, she did both Norma Rae -- for which she would earn her first Oscar -- and Beyond The Poseidon Adventure. Also, the studios decided, over the course of a mere decade (less, actually -- just seven years) that Field had gone from young, sexy comedienne (Kiss Me Goodbye) to ditzy fuckup (Surrender) to mother of the bride (Steel Magnolias); then there was that whole thing where Tom Hanks could be just a little younger than she and in love with her in Punchline, even though she was a frumpy, married loser, and then her son in Forrest Gump, six years later, and only ten real-life years her junior. If we were double Oscar winners who worried that every major wire service was already sitting on an obituary headlined "'Mrs. Gump's life was like a box of chocolates," we might also do some crazy things to try to stay relevant. Maybe not as crazy as Say It Isn't So, but who knows? Anyway, that was just one of the many post-Gump roles that allowed Field to take on various aspects of Mom-itude: Folksy Mom (Where The Heart Is); Trashy Mom (Say It Isn't So); Dying Mom (Two Weeks); Crazy Mom (ER); Raging Mom (Eye For An Eye); Not America's Real Mom (a Congresswoman in Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde). Field may be wee, but evidently you're not so big that she couldn't take you over her knee. And even pre-Gump, she was tough enough to defy all of stereotypical Islam (Not Without My Daughter, a title so frequently parodied that if Lifetime isn't planning a remake starring Tori Spelling, it will be by the time you get to the end of this sentence).

Danner, on the other hand, has gladdened the hearts of Red Hat Societeers and Raging Grannies everywhere by coming into her own, at least professionally, in the latter half of her life. Though she worked steadily through the '70s and '80s, she racked up only a couple of noteworthy credits (like The Great Santini -- though if you weren't the kid, the guy who bounced the basketball off the kid's head, or the basketball, no one probably even remembers you were in that thing). But in the '90s, Danner started working with marquee directors like Woody Allen (Alice, Husbands And Wives) and James Ivory (Mr. & Mrs. Bridge). Sure, this was the period when Danner started playing blowsy moms, but what the hell -- she was so good at it. Forces Of Nature, The Myth Of Fingerprints, No Looking Back...okay, that's a romcom vs. two depressing, stagey character studies, so we won't go so far as to say they're all basically the same movie or anything, but did she even bother to change her hair from one to the next? Or since? (Plus didn't she play Maura Tierney's mother in Forces, as Field would go on to do on ER?) Once she'd played a WASPy, wine-loving mom in Meet The Parents, the die was cast: there she was again -- fine, and funny, but definitely on autopilot -- as Will's mother on Will & Grace, as Huff's mother on Huff, as Sylvia's mother in Sylvia (here she at least affected a German accent...didn't she? We might have napped through that one), and then there was Meet The Fockers, lather, rinse, repeat. The woman's won two Emmys for Huff, granted, so it's probably the very best version of that role out of all the times she's tried it. We'd far rather see her do that from now until Gwyneth finally just fixes up a room on her English estate and lets Danner give it a rest already than cringe at her attempts to be a doctor (on 2002's short-lived Presidio Med), though even that was more credible than when Field pretended to be a Supreme Court justice (on 2002's short-lived The Court). In fact, if either of those preposterously matched roles and performers was responsible for convincing poor old Geena Davis that we'd ever buy her as the President of the United States, for God's sake, then Field and Danner owe her a lovely bouquet of orchids and a very heartfelt letter of apology. They failed on TV together (give or take a few months), so what the hell, they can draft the letter together, too.

And now Danner and Field are returning to our pop-cultural radar together again...kind of: Danner plays Jacinda Barrett's mother in The Last Kiss (opening Friday), while Field plays Calista Flockhart's mother on Brothers And Sisters (premiering next Sunday). Probably producers sold Brothers to Field by promising that she'd really get to sink her teeth into the reality of a woman's life when her five children have grown (...but that was like four departed showrunners ago), and Kiss to Danner by saying her character actually goes the whole nine by leaving her husband to seek later-life fulfillment (...but maybe, as an older lady, Danner has no idea that Kiss is just a typical "dude can't commit" story with a patina of Garden State for cred). Certainly, there are worse things Danner or Field could be doing (and, in both cases, worse things they have done), and women like Stockard Channing and Jane Fonda are probably really jealous that they're not even getting the chance to look at either Field's or Danner's castoffs. There are plenty of facets of motherhood, to be sure, and maybe, as real mothers themselves, Danner and Field just feel it's important to explore all those facets in their working lives. Maybe, in the next decade, they'll get to work on facets other than the four that they've each really perfected.

Advantage: Danner, who's at least repeating herself in the movies