A lovely détente born of intensity and trauma on ‘The Bear’
Includes spoilers from season 3 of “The Bear.”
One of the things I’ve liked about “The Bear” is the way it will break up the usual narrative drive forward to give us an episode that focuses in on a single character or a momentous event. This season, I was especially moved by the episode called “Ice Chips,” which gives us the day Natalie (Abby Elliott) gives birth. It was, like the best of “The Bear,” emotionally explosive and yet finely nuanced.
The intensity begins when she goes into labor and pulls over to the side of the road. But it ratchets up a whole lot of notches when, in a lastditch effort to find help, she utters the dreaded words to Siri, “Call Mom.” From last season, we know that Mom — Jamie Lee Curtis’s Donna — is a whole lot of work, and that her narcissism and alcoholism get in the way of her bonds with her family. She is locked inside her own misery and hardly available for others.
There is generational trauma at work in the Berzatto family, handed down from Donna to her children with varying effects. Natalie has learned that avoidance is the best way to deal with her mother, because she knows her mother will make their exchanges all about herself. But in an emergency, Natalie still fosters some hope that Donna will show up for her — just as she waited for Donna to show up in the season 2 finale.
And, despite plenty of rough patches, including tensions and judgments Natalie doesn’t need while she’s giving birth, Donna does show up for Natalie to some extent. She guides her daughter through the pain of contractions — urging her to breathe by repeating the word “he, he, he” and giving her the cold refreshment of ice chips. She is annoying, but, ultimately, she is comforting. Natalie, in the throes of extreme pain, has let Donna know that she has been a burden as a mother, and, by the end of the episode, Donna seems to have heard her.
It’s a lovely détente, and its power comes not only from the sharp script but from Elliott and Curtis, who are both extraordinarily good.