Starring: Lily Tomlin, Charles Grodin, Ned Beatty, Maria Smith, John Glover

Those who know The Deuce know The Deuce loves Moms and, if you know The Deuce, you know The Deuce loves celebrating Moms in an incredible and big way! Even if the Mom in question The Deuce is celebrating is THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING WOMAN! She’s still a Mom! And – as you can plainly see from the title: she’s incredible! The thing is: this little lady has a BIG problem! But a problem The Deuce feels worthy of celebration!!

The life of a wife and mom in super-suburban satisfaction is fractured when she finds herself getting all shrinky-dink’d due to what is proposed as an innate inability to tolerate the constant bombardment of consumer products other suburban housewives take in stride… The culprits?? Just the everyday hairsprays, floor waxes, “feminine products,” aerosol deodorants… the usual… and maybe that space-age future-glue her adman!??!

Schumacher’s first-stab at the camp-kitsch costuming he’d bring big to his Batmans imagines a suburban world posited in past and present… or neither nor… or.. something more… and very… pastel-palette’d! And albeit re-molding much of the source-material’s horror into mostly easy-going, goofy, good-natured comedy (including a great gorilla bit!), this wacky woman-ized version still manages, among the laughs, to plumb some pathos in its bathos and strike chords of commonality that very likely had the mothers in the New Amsterdam seats saying to the men in the audience: “Don’t YOU feel small now!” And who among us doesn’t know what it’s like to feel small??

Happy Mother’s Day! To the motherly shrinking woman in all of you!!