Looking for a family-friendly Christmas movie to enjoy with the whole family on a Friday night while decorating the tree or baking Christmas cookies? I’ve got you covered. We just watched Disney+ GODMOTHERED. It was the perfect fit for this girl mom and dad and our teen girls. It was refreshing and super cute with a new twist on the old fairy tale. Disney+ GODMOTHERED the fairy tale reimagined inclusively for everyone.
Set in Boston (one of our favorite cities, check out or visit Boston with teens guide if you’ve never been) at Christmastime, GODMOTHERED is a comedy about Eleanor, a young, inexperienced fairy godmother-in-training (Jillian Bell) who upon hearing that her chosen profession is facing extinction, decides to show the world that people still need fairy godmothers. Finding a mislaid letter from a 10-year-old girl in distress, Eleanor tracks her down and discovers that the girl, Mackenzie, is now a jaded and defeated 40-year-old single mom (Isla Fisher) working at a news station in Boston. Having lost her husband several years earlier, Mackenzie has all but given up on the idea of “Happily Ever After,” but Eleanor is bound and determined to give Mackenzie a happiness makeover, whether she likes it or not.
As a modern-day feminist raising strong girls, GODMOTHERED was everything I wanted in a warm, fuzzy holiday movie. It’s about more than happy endings, it is about girl power, loving yourself first because the most important person you need to love you is yourself and the courage to keep going even when life feels like it has no happy endings left to give. Be brave enough to make your own happy ending; there is no right or wrong, there is just happiness and it can look different for every person.
Eleanor seeks out Mackenzie to give her the typical happy ending that we’ve all been raised to believe is what we want and need. Meet the prince, marry the prince and live happily ever after but life isn’t a fairy tale and sometimes things don’t turn out the way we hoped or planned; sometimes happiness is something other than typical but equally as magical. Sometimes the happily ever after comes after surviving the hard parts of life. Maybe the hard parts make us able to recognize and appreciate the good things.
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Mackenzie meets Hugh Prince ( Venezuelan actor, Santiago Cabrera) and he’s a great guy who she works with. Over the course of the movie, she realizes that she does like the prince but she doesn’t need him. Her true love is her daughters and best friend. True love is everywhere if we’re willing and able to look past the expectation.
In Eleanor’s quest to give Mackenzie what she thinks will make her happy, all the while proving that fairy godmothers are not obsolete, both women learn a valuable lesson; we all have worth and happy endings come in all different kinds of ways. There is not just one ending that makes us happy. Happiness is in the heart of the beholder.
GODMOTHERED is endearing, funny and warm. At times it feels as though the happily ever after narrative is being forced upon us, but isn’t that the case in real life? As women, haven’t we all felt that narrative thrust upon us by society, our mothers and grandmothers before us? In the end, GODMOTHERED reflects the change and evolution of girls and women in our world today. We can do and be anything we want. We can have our careers, families, love and happiness too.
This updated fairytale is subtly empowering like the soft breeze of generations of women past lifting us up and giving us the courage to pursue our own path of happiness, whether that includes sharing our lives with a prince, another princess, children, alone or immersing ourselves in our careers. We make our own happiness, we only need to be brave enough to take a chance and go for it.
