nomnombutteredtoast
Can we also point out her mother’s redemption? Because she realizes at the end what has really happened. That they weren’t necessarily good for Matilda. They aren’t bad people, but they habitually made bad choices and didn’t think of Matilda. BUT FOR THAT ONE INSTANT. Her mother put Matilda’s needs and wants first. She realized they would never be what Matilda needed and thus let her go on to Miss Honey. And that is a beautifully loving thing.
No guys, I need to stop and talk about something in this movie and how fucking revolutionary it was; something that I haven’t seen in a movie before or since.
This is a movie about a kid who leaves her birth family.
Not a kid who find that they have a secret lineage or something that allows them to find their ‘true family’ - this is a movie about a kid whose true birth family is made up of bad people. So she gets out. And that is played as the right thing to do. She isn’t punished for it or made to feel bad about ‘abandoning her family’. There isn’t an underlying ‘but they’re your family and you have to love them’ or ‘they’re your family and they love you even if they don’t show it well or do hurtful things’ message of the kind that I see OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER in media. Matilda gets out and lives happily ever after because of it.
We need a million more movies like this to counter the metric shit ton of movies that directly counter this message.