The late 1990s revisited the pop-culture binary of career or motherhood. has relocated to Vermont, remade herself as a more palatable, stereotypically feminine businesswoman-one who runs a baby-food company, has Laura Ashley curtains, and begins dating the local vet, all of which viewers are encouraged to consider improvements to her life. She inherits a distant cousin’s baby following a tragic accident, and after a brief attempt to keep up her old life, she gives in.
“I am a tough, cold career woman,” she tells her boss, which is how you know she’s about to be schooled on the real meaning of existence: motherhood. Wiatt (played by then– 41-year-old Diane Keaton) a no-nonsense New York City advertising executive.
The heroine of 1987’s Baby Boom, for instance, was J.C. But it’s been Hollywood gold since the 1980s, when hit movies like Baby Boom, Working Girl, and Broadcast News delighted in portraying successful women as desperate. Pop culture’s preoccupation with fixing single, aging career women seems to have expanded over the last three decades, as birth rates have dropped and women have taken on more prominent roles in the workplace. Keeps me busy.” But before long, the daughter Miranda gave up for adoption tracks her down, which rescues Miranda from both further eating-establishment embarrassment and the prospect of a life without descendants. When beleaguered mom of two Sandy (Jennifer Aniston) interviews for a job at Miranda’s company, she asks Miranda if she has any kids and receives the curt reply, “Career. Second Act echoes one of the strands in Garry Marshall’s execrable 2016 ensemble film Mother’s Day, in which Julia Roberts plays Miranda, a jewelry designer for a home-shopping network who shakes her head ruefully when a waiter asks if she has any plans for Mother’s Day.
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From there, the movie shifts from a flawed but entertaining self-improvement narrative into a sappy, simplistic adoption-reunion story whose main goal seems to be to keep Maya from becoming a childless, work-obsessed bitch-a fate that Hollywood has long deemed worse than death. Instead, it goes with a twist that’s as sentimental as it is improbable: When Maya is asked to collaborate with her boss’ daughter Zoe (Vanessa Hudgens), who also works at Franklin and Clarke, the younger woman reveals that they’re more than coworkers-she’s the daughter Maya gave up for adoption more than 20 years earlier.
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Second Act’s less-than-original plot could have provided an opportunity to explore the ways that systemic discrimination keeps working-class women of color from professional advancement. She is swiftly headhunted for an executive role at cosmetics company Franklin and Clarke, where she plans to come clean about the deceit once she’s proven her expertise. When Dilly (Dalton Harrod), the teenage son of her best friend, Joan (Leah Remini), overhears Maya ranting about her dissatisfaction, he secretly creates a falsified résumé and Facebook page for her-one that claims she’s friends with Barack Obama, once climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and has an MBA from Wharton Business School. Lopez plays Maya, a 40-year-old assistant manager at a big-box store who is sick of younger, less experienced white men being promoted above her because she doesn’t have a college degree. Second Act, a December 2018 romantic comedy starring Jennifer Lopez and Leah Remini, didn’t top the box office or earn critical acclaim, but it did add to an age-old narrative in which an unmarried woman is saved from a sad, lonely existence by becoming a mother.
Jennifer Lopez as Maya, left, and Vanessa Hudgens as Zoe in Second Act (James Devaney/GC Images/Getty Images)