“Cheaper By the Dozen” is the beloved, true story of a family with twelve children and how they grew up in the early twentieth century. It began as a biographical book written by two brothers about their parents, Frank Bunker Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, and their everyday lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
The first attempt to make the book into a movie occurred in 1950 and that story relied heavily on the book for source material. A 2003 remake starring Steven Martin and Bonnie Hunt got mixed reviews. Now, the 2022 version is being criticized for modernizing the content so much that it barely resembles the original premise.
The funny thing about “Cheaper By the Dozen” was the family anecdotes about cooperating in a large family. However, the star of the newest movie, actress/activist Gabrielle Union, defended the decision to change the entire premise of the story to include a blended family rather than one which included a husband and wife who had twelve children together. She also expressed why it was so important to include different races in the newest movie version.
“The thing about all of those movies is they were all devoid of color. No people of color, no different, you know, cultures, languages, there is zero diversity at all. And in a lot of family fare, certainly the more classic, unless they’re cartoons and like not humans, there’s just very, very little diversity,” the 49-year-old actress told CinemaBlend.
“I was talking about this earlier today. I think one of the first films that I saw of brown people living in a multi-generational household where everyone’s talents were celebrated was ‘Encanto,’ and that just came out, you know what I mean?”
Critics argued that the change to a blended family made it more like the classic “Yours, Mine, and Ours” than “Cheaper By the Dozen.” Even the title doesn’t make sense anymore. Apparently, that line came from one of Frank Sr.’s favorite jokes, which was to reply that children were “cheaper by the dozen” when asked why he had so many. In the 2022 version, the blended family only has ten, not twelve.
Union, who served as executive producer on the project, also said her personal history was an inspiration for the movie’s premise. As she told CinemaBlend:
“So having a blended family of my own, and you know, being a part of the dozens of cousins, which we are the largest Black family in the state of Nebraska, one of the largest in the Midwest. We’ve always had a grandma that lived with us, or an aunt or a cousin, or neighborhood kids. Like, that’s just how we got down, we do believe we are our brother’s keeper.”
She continued, discussing how it was important for her to represent “different” families that weren’t “traditional” to normalize every type of arrangement.
“So, we wanted a family that represented what pretty much most communities of color have been doing since the dawn of time anyway. But our families are generally held up as a sign of failure if you don’t have the quote, unquote, traditional family, which I think is a bunch of BS and just use to shame folks for surviving any way they can. But our kinds of families are rarely celebrated, much less represented on screen. So, I wanted to be a part of rectifying that.”
Even mainstream critics weren’t enamored by the latest offering, calling it, “worse than formulaic” and “lazy and condescending to its audience.”
It’s enough to make moviegoers question why this totally different re-telling is considered a remake of the beloved original at all.
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Source: Dailywire
