Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Family Planning

2024; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 71; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/dss.2024.a938803

1946-0910

Sarah Jaffe,

Global Maternal and Child Health

ABSTRACT: At the end of last year, a friend and I sat down to watch the 2002 Hugh Grant vehicle About a Boy . Grant’s character is kind of a loser, one who does nothing all day but live off the royalties of a hit song his father once wrote. While dating a single mother, he realizes two things: one, that single moms have lots of responsibilities and don’t expect too much from him, and two, that he actually likes kids. He goes in search of more single mothers, and stumbles into a friendship with a tween boy (Nicholas Hoult, who is now all grown up and starring in films like The Favourite ). He’s romantically uninterested in the kid’s mother (Toni Collette), but the kid won’t let him bail, and while he’s trying to impress another woman (Rachel Weisz), ultimately his emotional growth comes through his decision to accept the role that the kid has given him as a sort of surrogate dad or uncle or something that we don’t have the language for. The film ends with a Christmas party with the raucous extended nonfamily the kid has assembled around him: bio-mom and dad, Hugh Grant and his girlfriend and girlfriend’s son, and some other miscellaneous, multigenerational, multigender friends. I turned to my friend and said, “I actually endorse this.”