Mrs. Doubtfire Is About a Man Financially Scamming His Ex-Wife
When I became a parent two years ago, my life changed in all the ways you would expect. Suddenly, I was responsible for another human being, I forgot what sleep felt like, I stopped using a mirror for about six months straight…the usual. But what I didn’t expect to happen was for my brain to start playing a brand-new game called “Adulting All Over My Favorite Movies and TV Shows.”
Case in point: Mrs. Doubtfire, the charming 1993 Robin Williams vehicle in which the late Academy Award winner played a divorcee who impersonated an elderly Scottish nanny in order to see his children. The movie is classic Williams family-friendly fare—manic, hilarious streams of improv interspersed with heartwarming moments of drama.
“Daniel Hillard essentially scammed his ex-wife Miranda out of $300 a week so he could look after his own kids.”
But as Mrs. Doubtfire celebrates its 25th anniversary today, not even sentimental reunions (taken from an upcoming Today interview in honor of the movie’s milestone) have softened my post-mommyhood take on a fundamentally messed-up element of the film’s plot: Daniel Hillard (Williams) essentially scammed his ex-wife Miranda (Sally Field) out of $300 a week so he could look after his own kids.
For all that time “Mrs. Doubtfire” worked for the Hillard family, “she” was definitely paid; Daniel even mentions it as one of his jobs to the visiting court liaison, Mrs. Sellner, claiming to have picked up a gig “cleaning houses.” Yes, “Mrs. Doubtfire” does cook and clean, for which I agree payment is acceptable, but the real issue here is “she” was primarily hired to look after the three children—Lydia (Lisa Jakub; whose reunion tweets featuring her movie siblings and “Stepdad Stu,” Pierce Brosnan, went viral in October), Chris (Matthew Lawrence) and Natalie (Mara Wilson).
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At the end of the film, when Miranda agrees to let Daniel watch their kids in the afternoons in lieu of a housekeeper, she also ostensibly does away with the cooking/cleaning hired help element as well. This leads me to believe that the only “help” she was willing to pay for was child care; the cooking/cleaning part was just a bonus. And when it turns out the person who was watching your kids all along was their own father, well, on the one hand, that’s pretty damn brilliant on Daniel’s part. But on the other, given the exorbitant cost of child care in this country, that’s the real fraud of this movie.
“As someone who struggles to pay for child care herself, it seems to me that Miranda’s bitterness toward Daniel is misguided.”
I would think that what infuriated Miranda the most over being duped by her ex-husband was the fact that she paid to have her kids looked after by their father—not that he dressed up as an old lady. Here is someone who was quickly established in the movie’s opening scenes to be the Hillard family’s breadwinner, picking up the slack for her perpetually out-of-work husband (who, I might add, under the guise of “Mrs. Doubtfire,” gets out his post-divorce aggression by regularly slut-shaming Miranda once she upgrades to Brosnan’s character. Ew).
Looking back on the film now as someone who struggles to pay for child care herself, it seems to me that Miranda’s bitterness toward Daniel is misguided: No, it was not cool for him to pretend to be Mary Poppins, but it does bother me that Miranda doesn’t have at least one line of dialogue where she demands that Daniel return all the money she paid him—especially once he turned “Mrs. Doubtfire” into the host of San Francisco’s version of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and became (I hope) financially solvent.
PHOTO: Collection Christophel / Alamy Stock Photo
I get that none of this happened because it’s a movie, and Mrs. Doubtfire does deserve credit for helping to normalize divorce in movies. I’ll give it that. And I’ll even forgive the judge for not mentioning this potential financial fraud problem in Mrs. Doubtfire’s climactic courtroom scene (even though he had to have known about it) because then we get into a much more complicated issue, which is the likelihood that Miranda paid “Mrs. Doubtfire” under the table to begin with.
But for all of us out there for whom child care is a daily challenge, the preferred happy ending for Mrs. Doubtfire would’ve had Daniel picking up his kids—and handing Miranda a check refunding her money for baby-sitting services rendered.