We found this movie on Netflix streaming. It is written and directed by Helen Hunt, who also stars. The animosity displayed between the mom and her son is hard to get past at times but overall it ties up with an important life lesson.
Helen Hunt is Jackie, a New York author and publishing company executive. She drives her career hard and has a few quirks. We see some early when she is at a high-rise swimming pool doing laps using the dog paddle, so that she never has to get her hair wet.
She is single and has a son, Brenton Thwaites as Angelo. He is also an aspiring writer, finishing high school, and set to attend an arts and science college in Manhattan. Their backstory of sorts is that she has become very attached to her son, as well as being very demanding of his writing, probably as an overreaction to having her other son die in his youth.
All that sets up the core of the story which is Angelo dropping out of college to travel to California to be near his father. He wants to get away from the New York rat race and figure out what he wants to do, citing many examples of successful authors who didn't finish college. But mostly he wants to move far away from mom.
Mom doesn't get angry, at least not much that we can see, instead she packs a bag and unannounced travels to California. She has had a problem letting go and at one point when Angelo mentions surfing, as one example of something Jackie would never do, she stubbornly tells herself it can't be that hard, she'll just get a board and begin surfing. She learns the hard way there's much more to it.
The title "Ride" is a reference to riding that wave, finally, as a metaphor for her letting go a bit, for herself and also for her son. In the end he decides to move back to New York and resume his college but she decides to stay in California, beginning to give her son the freedom he deserves.
Early in the movie when mom and son discuss how to end a fictional story her saying is it should be "something surprising and inevitable." That is the ending Helen Hunt wrote into this screenplay.
Helen Hunt is Jackie, a New York author and publishing company executive. She drives her career hard and has a few quirks. We see some early when she is at a high-rise swimming pool doing laps using the dog paddle, so that she never has to get her hair wet.
She is single and has a son, Brenton Thwaites as Angelo. He is also an aspiring writer, finishing high school, and set to attend an arts and science college in Manhattan. Their backstory of sorts is that she has become very attached to her son, as well as being very demanding of his writing, probably as an overreaction to having her other son die in his youth.
All that sets up the core of the story which is Angelo dropping out of college to travel to California to be near his father. He wants to get away from the New York rat race and figure out what he wants to do, citing many examples of successful authors who didn't finish college. But mostly he wants to move far away from mom.
Mom doesn't get angry, at least not much that we can see, instead she packs a bag and unannounced travels to California. She has had a problem letting go and at one point when Angelo mentions surfing, as one example of something Jackie would never do, she stubbornly tells herself it can't be that hard, she'll just get a board and begin surfing. She learns the hard way there's much more to it.
The title "Ride" is a reference to riding that wave, finally, as a metaphor for her letting go a bit, for herself and also for her son. In the end he decides to move back to New York and resume his college but she decides to stay in California, beginning to give her son the freedom he deserves.
Early in the movie when mom and son discuss how to end a fictional story her saying is it should be "something surprising and inevitable." That is the ending Helen Hunt wrote into this screenplay.