Nicholas Ma’s ‘Mabel’ is a film for adults and children alike

Mabel plays like a hybrid of adult and child drama. A good deal of screentime is ceded to Callie’s parents, and their struggles to “get” their daughter. But the bulk of the plot fixates on Callie, her bond with her potted plant—the eponymous Mabel—and her enthusiasm for science, nurtured by Mrs. G (Judy Greer), the no-nonsense substitute teacher who takes Callie under her wing even though she’s a few grades below Mrs. G’s usual teaching level. Ma, the son of the Chinese American cellist Yo-Yo Ma, raises profound questions around empathy: how can a child, even one as self-assured as Callie, be expected to make their feelings understood when they don’t totally understand their own feelings? How can the adults in her life open up their minds to understand her?

I got to speak with Ma about the rigors of parenting willful kids, the value of movies that speak to children and adults alike, and the experience of childhood as a sequence of big life changes.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Andy Crump: This is a grownup drama, but it's so baked into Callie’s perspective that if I show it to my 6-year-old, she’ll respond to it. Who is Mabel for?
Nicholas Ma: It's funny. I grew up watching those great live action movies that were for families—whether it was Mary Poppins, or The Sound of Music, or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. As I rewatch them now, there's so much drama and, and social commentary embedded in them. In The Sound of Music, we're dealing with one of the greatest tragedies in human history. In Mary Poppins, we're talking about women's suffrage. These are not simple conversations for young people. There’s a lot of singing and dancing in Mary Poppins, but there's real subtlety and nuance to what's actually being discussed around what it means to have runs on banks, or what it does to society if we don't care about the way we feed birds.

So I love that genre, where you watch a film and say, “I want to watch it again, and I want this person to be in the room at the same time. I want to watch it with my kid. I want to watch it with my grandma. I want to watch it with my cousin.” That's my hope with a movie like this, that there's a way in for someone of every age, but there's also a gift that's just for each specific age.  As a parent of a 2-year-old, I feel like there's a gift for parents in there too, about how hard it is to be a parent, how hard it is to have a child you love, when you see how extraordinary they are, but you worry about how they’re going to make their way into the world.

AC: I have my 6-year-old and my 4-year-old; these are things that I worry about all the time. I think about Callie and how if I were in her parents' shoes, my reaction would be, “I love her, but she’s a pain in the *ss.” But the film is invested in her loneliness and feeling that, not just other kids, but her parents and grownups don't understand her. I wonder if that cuts to a place in young Nicholas. Does her experience reflect your own as a kid?
NM: You'll have to ask my parents whether I was as much of a pain in the *ss, but I remember that age feeling very lonely. It’s interesting. We made the movie coming out of COVID. There was a reacquaintance with loneliness, and that loneliness is always lurking just around the corner. It's amazing how it can sneak up on us, and I think as a young person, you don't know what to do with it. You don't know how to fix it or solve it, and I think we're struggling with that more as a society. What does it mean to walk up to a stranger and strike up a conversation? That feels terrifying. So I think it definitely speaks to young Nicholas feeling like I wasn't sure whether who I was, was appealing to somebody else. 

But I think it speaks to grownup Nicholas, too, this notion of what it means to be a very particular person, where you worry that maybe this puzzle piece doesn't have a place where it fits in the puzzle. The challenge isn't to change the puzzle piece that you are; the challenge is to know that it's going to be okay, and there is a place in the world that is longing for you. 

AC: I love the ways in which the movie speaks to that. I feel for (Callie) because she goes through so much upheaval. For you, is that what childhood is—a series of upheavals?
NM: Yeah. As kids, we think we have a sense of the world around us. I don't know if you ever had this experience where you ran into your first grade teacher outside of the classroom, and it just blew your mind?

AC: It was so weird.
NM: As you get older, you get the idea that teachers have lives beyond the classroom, or parents have lives, but you don't have that sense of what's happening in the world, and that people could have complicated interior lives that are apart from yours. Often, movies about kids leave them as ciphers in this complicated world of adults. To me, it’s  much more interesting to think about the world being a cipher to this kid that actually has a pretty good handle on the things she loves and what she wants. Callie’s not a wallflower. She's a persistent kid. That comes with being really confident that, “I'm going into show and tell today and everyone is going to be so excited to see my dinosaur,” and then maybe you don't get the reaction that you think.

I think that upheaval is part of learning how to be human, and I think that we can be so intolerant of that as opposed to seeing that as an inevitable part of growing up. And it's a movie, so all of those upheavals are compressed into a much shorter time span. Hopefully in our lives, it's not upheaval after upheaval. My grandmother died a couple years ago, and she said, shortly before she died, “I've had a good life with not too many terrible things.” I always think about that. “Not too many terrible things.” That feels like about what we can hope for, and I hope for that for Callie—not too many terrible things.

AC: Just the right amount of terrible things.
NM: Just the amount that she can handle!

AC: The movie leaves off in a gentle place for her. Mabel, the plant, becomes almost a functional character in the end. I'm curious where (the plant motif) comes from, especially because the movie is most at ease when you're photographing plants. Those moments make a nice contrast with the more chaotic parts of the film. What made you settle on botany as grist for her character?
NM: It was the originating image. I was reading about plant intelligence, and the ways that plants have even more senses than we have as humans, and it blew my mind. I went to sleep and had some kind of fever dream, woke up in the middle of the night, and I thought, “Callie has a best friend who's a plant named Mabel.” And that was it. Sometimes these ideas that feel like certainties keep leading to new things. One of the things that I think about so much are timescales. We are so trapped in a very human timescale, and it fools us into confusing what's urgent and what's happening. There’s a reason why people contemplate nature and plants when they need to calm down; this has been happening over decades, maybe even hundreds of years. It reorients you.

I remember reading about the Greenland shark, which averages around 272 and 512 years. They don't come to sexual maturity until they're about 150. 

AC: That's insane to think about.
NM: You have Greenland sharks that are just starting to date who were born before the car existed! So, “Okay, got it, maybe I can just take a breath.” I love that contrast, and  that reminder that whatever gear we are in is a gear that we can change. Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the intensity of the feelings that we have. That’s why (Mabel) is a movie I hope families watch together, because it's easier to say, “That thing that Callie did, that you thought was annoying—do you also recognize it? Because that's something Dad does, that's something that you do, that’s something that we do.” We get so overwhelmed and sometimes we need space, or maybe a big hug. How do we talk about those things as opposed to seeing them as things that are scary, or shameful?