You know what? “Because I Said So” has the perfect name.

This fluffy flick about a deeply codependent, boundaryless family recently showed up on a lot of people’s “Worst Movies of 2007″ lists. Ebert and Roeper, Rotten Tomatoes (where it was number one), the Washington Post (ditto), Mick LaSalle, Double Viking, CNN…. Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum summarized it beautifully: “An unbelievable mess.” But my favorite review came from thirteen-year-old martimusic123 on Common Sense Media: “The characters were horribly fake and annoying. I had a meltdown watching this movie it was so bad. My toes were curling the entire time about how controlling the mother was…. If you had to grow up with a mother like the one in the movie you would be much more messed up as an adult.”

The basic plot centers around a mother of three adult daughters who is inexplicably obsessed with getting the youngest one married off. Diane Keaton, as the manipulatively “nice” mother who spends the movie trying to control everything about her youngest daughter’s life to avoid facing her own upcoming 60th birthday, whines to the other three kids, “Is it crazy for me to want her to have one healthy relationship in her life?”

The wonderful thing about “Because I Said So” is that Keaton’s character Daphne goes on to demonstrate exactly why Mandy Moore’s Milly is unable to have a healthy relationship. She’s grown up in a family where there are no sexual boundaries (the daughters stand around making personal comments about their mother’s underwear and describing their partners’ genitals in detail, Daphne pushes Milly to talk about what orgasms are like and discuss the fact that Daphne has never had one, Milly ends up demonstrating the sounds she makes during orgasm at great length for her mother) and no emotional boundaries (every family member is obsessed with Milly’s love life, shames her about her appearance and behavior down to her weird nervous laugh, and the mother spends all her energy trying to control who Milly goes out with and what she will wear with them behind her back). As Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post wrote, “Daphne is the embodiment of toxic parenting, her enmeshment in her children’s lives so neurotic that she seems more like a stalker than a mother.”

As a result, Milly has no sexual or emotional boundaries, no concept of healthy communication, and a pattern of scary relationships with people who were unavailable for anything healthy. Sex addicts who are cheating on their partner with her, manipulative jerks, and on and on. Diane Keaton’s line is the classic battle cry of the dangerously codependent: her intense manipulation has set Milly up to have unhealthy relationships, so (blissfully ignoring this fact) she leaps to use that same manipulation to get Milly what she is sure will magically be a healthy relationship. Hey, if what you’re doing isn’t working, just do it harder and harder and harder!

The daughters eventually band together to deliver the message that their mother is just distracting herself from her sixtieth birthday. (Why are there three of these characters? There’s no difference between them.) She’s projecting her own desire for a relationship onto her daughter, instead of being honest about what she wants and working toward it. And so she meets a guy by accident, has sex with him immediately, and then marries him. And we’re supposed to believe that this solves her problem, instead of just being a symptom of it.

“Because I Said So” suffers from the same two-dimensional cluelessness of “The Devil Wears Prada.” They both seem to have been created by people with untreated borderline personality disorder, codependency taken to its pathological extreme. One hallmark of BPD is the lack of a sense of self and the corresponding inability to perceive others as real multi-dimensional people. “Because I Said So” and “The Devil Wears Prada” are both great examples of how this plays out in Hollywood: their characters don’t have personalities so much as a collection of traits. She’s cute, she’s a baker, she has bad relationships – and any of these things can change on a dime to serve the plot, whether or not it makes sense.

These movies use the secondary characters as messengers to tell us what to believe about people like Daphne and Milly… because we certainly wouldn’t buy into the idea that Daphne is a great mom who just wants the best for her kid or that Milly is just a hapless young person who needs to meet the right guy if they weren’t telling us so every few seconds. Because none of that is true and none of it is being demonstrated by Daphne and Milly themselves. “Prada” and “Because I Said So” are the worst kind of borderline movies, the kind that are deeply divorced from how real people talk and behave, the kind where the writer or director is basically just standing behind the scenes yelling at us to believe that these are charming and relatable people.

“Because I Said So” is a fabulous name for this movie because it so neatly summarizes the insanity of the control freak. Controlling, codependent parenting so often ends up with the parent justifying decisions this way – “Because I said so, that’s why!” And it’s very revealing: “I don’t have a reason. I’m reacting out of my own triggers. I am angry because you aren’t taking my suggestions or demands on completely. I am upset because you are outside of my control and I can’t stand the emotions that come up when I am unable to control something. Do what I say, damnit! My emotional health, in fact my whole life, seems to depend on it, because I’m not taking care of my own issues!”
This must be unintentional, of course, because the movie doesn’t seem to be aware that what it is illustrating is abuse and its effects.

Instead of the sharp, bitter, funny movie that this could have been if it had been made by people who had dealt with their family issues and cast abusive behavior as the villain, “Because I Said So” is 102 minutes of pain. Every one of those minutes is expecting, even demanding, that the audience accept intense codependency as funny and charming, and buy into the unrealistic and empty characters it’s whipped up to make its arguments. The one bright spot is that it was so universally reviled. Happily, as a society, we’re turning away from the kind of thinking that ends with “Because I said so.”