Of course, martyrdom and self-sacrifice come with that package, too, and no matter how much Evelyn does for her family, at every turn she has to give up something she really wants just because little Johnny needs her for something or other. But even though Evelyn earns our sympathy immediately, Anderson has clearly written her with the intent that we should never condescend to her. And as Moore plays her, we never feel the need to. In one scene, we see Kelly being subdued by the police, who have been called after he's made a ruckus in the kitchen, bashing in the top of the large freezer Evelyn has just won. The cops yak with him, manly-like, chatting about baseball scores, and everything seems to be OK. But Evelyn, as a good Catholic, wants to confer with her parish priest about the incident.

So she sits down with him and explains some of her frustrations: Kelly works hard, but he doesn't bring home enough of the money; he's emotionally -- and, the suggestion is made more than once, physically -- abusive when he's drunk.

The priest listens patiently, and then suggests how hard it must be for Kelly to carry the responsibility for supporting all those kids. "Try to make him a good home," the priest urges, adding what he surely believes is a comforting footnote: "No one ever said that life is easy."

Moore's Evelyn listens to him as he speaks, taking it all in with openhearted earnestness. But when he gets to that line, the camera captures the change that shades her face. Her eyes, which just an instant ago were alert, intelligent, and sparkling from somewhere deep inside her, take on a cold, flat blackness. Something inside her has shut off: Suddenly, we realize that she long ago saw through the lie of the happy housewife, and now here's a man of the cloth, sitting at her own table, trying to feed her a line of baloney. That's a lot for an actress to pack into one look, but it's all there.

Evelyn doesn't challenge him, but she doesn't need to. She sees the underlying menace in his cluelessness about the way real people -- real women -- live. Her skill at jingle writing is the sort of thing we might laugh at, a silly talent that she happens to have cultivated. But the whole phenomenon of jingle-writing contests suggests that those old-time advertising men knew that housewives had something invaluable: These women could speak for, and to, their peers. Why not harness them as cheap labor, for the price of a new toaster or coffee pot or all-expenses-paid trip for two to New York City?

But for Evelyn, and for the clever coterie of fellow jingle contestants she eventually meets (a ring of housewives led by the breezily sharp Laura Dern), the joke is on the menfolk. Who's more gullible: housewives who might be potentially swayed by a catchy advertising slogan, or men who need to believe in the stupidity and inferiority of those women? And so when Evelyn faces that priest, his genial hypocrisy hits her like the insult it is. She refuses to countenance it, instead maintaining her polite, cheerful facade. Meanwhile, he walks away believing he's done a service to humanity -- he's just been sold a line of goods by an unassuming housewife, and he doesn't even have the brains to see it. Of the two of them, he's the one who probably really believes that Dash makes his washer 10 feet tall.

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