The new Julianne Moore film, The Prize-Winner of Defiance, Ohio, did not make the list of box-office winners this weekend. Aside from a sharp-eyed review by Stephanie Zacharek in Salon on Friday, a lot of critics seem to have missed the film. Pity. It’s a small film but deeply resonant for anyone who grew up in the fifties with too many siblings and too little money. Most importantly, it is a tribute to mothers everywhere who try to shield their kids from life’s more unpleasant realities while instilling them with a sense of wonder and possibility.

It made me think of my mom.

Moore’s character is an extreme example of that when-life-hands-you-a-lemon-make-lemonade heroine. Based on Terry Ryan’s memoir of her mother, the Prize-Winner recalls a lost era in American advertising, when companies sponsored countless contests that took actual skill: write a jingle extolling the virtues of Dr. Pepper. Fill in the blanks of this pop song celebrating a sandwich. Countless moms tried their luck in pursuit of prizes ranging from free appliances to cars and trips to Switzerland. (Some of the funniest scenes come when Moore meets a society of homemakers all doing the same thing, who critique each other’s work: it’s a sort of commercially driven poetry salon, but the prize their eyes are upon is a lifetime supply of Jello, instead of the Pulitzer.) In a pre-Betty Friedan age of housewife drudgery these women with brains and talent and nowhere to express them found each other, while pursuing the bright elusive butterfly of material nirvana.

For Moore’s character though it was a matter of survival. While Dad (played by Woody Harrelson, with a pot belly and a pair of nerd glasses) drank his paycheck, Moore kept the wolf at bay by cashing in all those luxury vacations and selling the sports cars. Harrelson gives a performance on a par with Moore’s, lending complexity to an unlovable, self-pitying alcoholic. Our dad was not prone to self-recrimination — his ego was too huge to allow room for that — but his screaming, physically abusive side sure looked familiar. The scene in which one of their ten children is afraid to walk near him as he rages over a baseball game was a page from my life. Dad would sit, cold Burgie in hand, watching the Gillete Cavalcade of Sports and lord help the child who got between him and his fight.

Our mother did not enter any contests that I recall but she clipped her share of coupons and tried hard to make our poverty tolerable by pretending our survival was part of some great adventure. Hey, let’s go pick black berries in Grant’s Pass! Buckets and buckets of them that then found their way into pancakes, muffins, cereal, jam — to the point where I couldn’t stand to look at black berries when I was older. When we had nothing to eat in the house but waffle mix and ice cream she combined the two to make a nine-year-old kid’s idea of a dream dinner. And when we couldn’t afford to buy toy weapons to enact our games of Viking, pirate etc. she used tin foil and cardboard to forge swords and shields, some with emblems and coats of armor taken from history books.

It’s important to be happy, she told us, even when she wasn’t herself. I still use my imagination to forge the armor I need in this world. And I still thank my mother for that.