THE YEAR DOLLY PARTON WAS MY MUM

How could I possibly miss dipping into a DVD with a title like this. All my serious criteria for movie watching just had to be set aside, even though I knew this had all the possibility of being a piece of silly fluff, but once I knew that it had been blessed by the mighty Dolly herself, I couldn’t resist.

The year is 1976 and Elizabeth is an average 11 year old girl who is fixated with talking with her best friend about breasts, and anxiously waiting to get her first period. Oh yes, and listening to Dolly Parton records non-stop. She lives in a Canadian suburb with an obsessively correct and uptight middle class mother who thinks she is a cut above the rest of the neighborhood …. and a father who simply goes along with that just to keep the peace.

One day when a school assignment requires Elizabeth to find out the blood types of her parents and herself, she discovers that they are not related at all. As her schoolmates politely put it …’so you’re a bastard then!’ She is understandably hurt and confused at the revelation and is determined to find her birth mother. She decides on the slightest of pretexts that it must be Dolly Parton (they both write poems at age 11, and Elizabeth has a birthmark in the shape of a butterfly which is something Dolly loves … butterflies, that is, not birthmarks).

Dolly is appearing in a Concert one night across the US border in Minneapolis so Elizabeth gets dressed in her finest (trashy) clothes, slaps make up on, and goes to ‘re-unite with Dolly’ so she sets off on her kiddy bike even though she turns out to have no real sense of direction. Marion her mother returns home and panics when she realises that Elizabeth had been upset enough to run away from home and hotfoots after her by car even though she cannot drive.

It’s a very sacharine coming-of-age story …. and as much as Elizabeth has to start to deal with becoming a young woman, it’s equally about Marion also having to revaluate who she is and her place in this evolving new world. It’s a lovely period piece not just because of the way that parents and children interacted back then …..but also those fabulous bad hairstyles and some atrocious wallpaper.

The redeeming feature … aside two very charming

performances by the two leading ladies …. is the whole thing is set to Dolly Parton music. And there is the fervent expectation that Miss P will suddenly appear and make us all happy. But you will have to go to Netflix/Amazon yourself to see if dreams really do come true.

★★★★★★★