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| Mother, The |
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  (8/10)
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Runtime: 112 |
| Public Rating: 8.33 (15 votes) |
Director: Roger Michell |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: drama |
Year: 2004 |
| Writer(s): Hanif Kureishi |
| Distributor: Sony Picture Classics (US), Dendy Films (Aus); |
| Reviewed by: Avril Carruthers |
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Directed by Roger Michell
Written by Hanif Kureishi
Produced by Kevin Loader
Starring Anne Reid, Daniel Craig, Cathryn Bradshaw, Steven Mackintosh, Anna Wilson-Jones, Oliver Ford Davies, Peter Vaughan.
The Mother is a frank, clear-eyed view of an ordinary mother and grandmother suddenly widowed, who explores her newly acquired freedom in an affair with her daughter’s lover. Much of the value of this gentle-paced and understated film is in the outstanding acting of the lead Anne Reid and the authenticity of the characterisation. It shares similar elements of basic plot as another recent British film, the very light Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War, in which this little-explored situation was turned into a comedy. In this drama, however, the relationships are exposed and recognisable, with no glossing over of uncomfortable truths and conflicts. The growth-path of May (Anne Reid) is at times prickly and unpredictable while the resolution is open-ended and thought-provoking.
Director Roger Michell, whose wide-ranging talents gave us Changing Lanes, Notting Hill and Persuasion, here teams with exceptional writer Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette) to highlight a critical time in the life of a family, allowing some insightful comments and provocative observations along the way. The setting of the film is largely in West London, and the busyness and anonymity of urban life contrasts with long silent shots in which the characters are seen either from a distance in crowds or framed alone against a wall, underlining their loneliness and disconnection.
The film opens with gentle breathing sounds of an elderly couple in bed. He’s asleep, she’s awake with her back to him and unmoving, staring into the camera with the look of someone long resigned to the treadmill of her existence. In the morning she dresses him and they wait in the silence for a taxi which will take them to the train station for a trip to London to see their children and grandchildren. May and Toots (Peter Vaughan), grandparents in their sixties, sit on the train side by side without speaking, as people do who are used to listening more to their own thoughts than the familiar banalities of their partner’s conversation. Their son Bobby (Steven Mackintosh) and his wife Helen (Anna Wilson-Jones – who played a similar, impatiently aloof and modern daughter-in-law in Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War) and their two children live a fully occupied life where the older couple feature only marginally, and as soon as they arrive the younger ones leave for their busy day. Left in the house with the renovating builder Darren (Daniel Craig), Toots and Darren discuss cricket while the camera follows May out into the sunlit garden, the sounds of birds and the distant city noises a cocoon in which she finds nourishment of her own.
That evening May and Toots dine with Bobby and their single-mum daughter Paula (Cathryn Bradshaw), a neurotic, wannabe writer who is more demonstrably self-absorbed than the apparently successful Bobby. Later that night, after complaining of what he thinks is indigestion following Paula’s cooking, Toots dies of a heart attack. It precipitates May into a no-man’s land where she cannot stay at home, with Toots’ slippers waiting for him in the empty hallway just where he left them. Seeing a future of ‘sitting down with the TV and cups of tea like all the other old girls’, May would rather kill herself.
Bobby: Don’t be difficult, Mum.
May: Why shouldn’t I?
Bobby: What?
May: Why shouldn’t I be difficult?
The death of a loved one allows the surface to crack in an otherwise placid or resigned existence below which the buried fire of passion unexpectedly still burns, even in those over sixty. It’s a turning point in the lives of family members, allowing different directions to be explored in the shifts of relationship dynamics.
Unwelcome at Bobby and Helen’s, May finds herself staying with Paula, whose life is in turmoil with her married lover Darren, Bobby’s builder and old friend. May finds herself immediately utilised as baby-sitter and confidante to her daughter’s romantic uncertainties.
Darren is an unstructured soul who drifts through life in much the same way as Paula. Hearing that Paula intends to finish with him, May begins to build on what initially is a pleasant affinity between herself and this man half her age. The attraction between May and Darren is possible, we see, because he doesn’t do things in any conventional prescripted way. He likes her as a person. And May, like many women suddenly widowed, is set free from a lifetime of restrictions. In a very natural way a sensual attraction emerges and it is in parallel with her reawakening interest in her creativity and her artistic nature, long set aside for the duty of wife- and motherhood, that her re-exploration of sex develops.
May: I thought no-one would ever touch me again, except the undertaker.
Anne Reid’s May is not a svelte, glamorous woman. With Toots and her children her posture is even frumpish and she dresses in muted, neutral colours. An extraordinary transformation – albeit subtly achieved – takes place when she becomes involved with Darren. She starts wearing dark denim, a stylish scarf and primary colours; her make-up and hair are slightly more glamorous and alluring; she visibly blooms and sparkles. She becomes sexy. However, watch what happens later when her daughter Paula partners her off with the elderly Bruce (Oliver Ford Davies), who woefully seems to be of the same ilk as Toots.
May’s transformations occur unnoticed under the nose of Paula, whose vacillating over Darren plunges from deciding to end the relationship to asking him to leave his wife.
One of the film’s major themes is how we go about getting what we want and how the way we see ourselves affects our interactions with others. It also deals with the self-absorption of each of the characters, highlighted in the different ways Paula and May describe their experience of the time of Paula and Bobby’s childhood and May’s early motherhood.
Paula: (seeing May dressed in denim) Very sixties, mum.
May: (quietly, to the mirror) Yes, well. I was washing nappies then. By hand.
May is portrayed as an old-fashioned, conventional mother, who chose to make her own needs and development subservient to those of her children and her husband; her resultant unhappiness necessitating that she finally re-establishes the validity of her own needs when her husband dies. The effect of her early unhappiness on her children is that Paula feels unloved and unappreciated, compensating for her insecurities by teaching a writers’ group. Bobby feels the need to propitiate to his demanding wife Helen, at the same time covertly making her unhappy. In contrast to May, Helen is a modern mother who affords a nanny and is determined to carve out a career in retail. The pressures on her young family are seen to take a different form in Bobby’s resentment and their children’s selfish indifference.
While Darren is responsive and sensitive towards May, and insightful about Bobby’s dysfunctional relationship, he is also shown as less than a whole, self-determined adult in his careless availing himself of Helen’s unspecified medication from her medicine cabinet and his stoned, resentful outburst about ‘all you women, always demanding something from me’, just after his expectations of receiving money from May are thwarted. He also seems not to make too much distinction between May and her daughter, though there is a superficial respect for May he appears not to show Paula.
The bitter-sweet humour of the film arises in moments of disillusionment or reversal of expectation, for example in the shocked reactions of Bobby and Paula when they discover May’s explicitly sexual drawings of Darren. It’s hilarious.
Paula’s melodramatic determination to make her mother responsible for her, Paula's, failures manifests in her eventually burning her own writing, while May stands ineffectually nearby, begging her to stop and denying that she ever said Paula had no talent. It’s evidently a recreation of a long held childhood pattern and in another failure - this time of Paula’s therapist in helping her client safely express her violent resentment of her mother - Paula has to hit May in the face in order to feel better.
The film gives a potent portrayal of the problems of family life and relationships having no easy answer or correct formula. While a mature woman’s sexual exploration with a much younger man may seem to some to be the major subject of the film, it is shown to be just one of the possible consequences of a socially conditioned woman’s finally reclaiming her independence. May seems to be doing this among a bunch of selfish, childish neurotics, and ultimately must find her way out in the world on her own, in a positive and hopeful statement of personal responsibility.
The film's sets are subtly powerful enough to draw mention. The silent emptiness of Toots’ and May’s suburban house, even when they are in it, contrasts with the broad expanses of white walls and contemporary primary colours of Bobby and Helen’s house, where the children seem to bounce off the walls; the chaotic dilapidation of Paula’s house and the old-fashioned, dark and stifling effect of Bruce’s house, when the elderly writer’s group member takes May home for a disastrous, suffocating quickie, contrast against the busy city landscape May observes from the London Eye and the sparse elegance of the Tate Modern gallery, with its life-size sculptures of naked human bodies. Again there is a subtle echo of May’s unreadiness for old age in her slight shudder at the dark grey, shapeless sculptured figures of an old couple contrasted against the bright gold statue of the young man. Jeremy Sams’ meditative solo piano deepens an already atmospheric film.
An extraordinary film, complex and thoughtfully provocative.
Avril Carruthers, 15th April 2004
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 Printable Version
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Society has certain taboos, among them are the manner in which older women are depicted in movies. They cannot be nude, and most importantly they cannot be shown (or suggested to be) having sex. Last year, Something's Gotta Give and Calendar Girls broke that taboo; the former with flashes of Diane Keaton's overly-matured rack while the latter had a dozen of such flashes. The year before, Kathy Bates stretched the boundary of acceptable nudity with her "monstrous" disrobement in About Schmidt. If such 'glorious' eyefuls do not perturb you, neither will The Mother where the title character - who is at least in her early 60's - experiences the rejuvenation of her youth through ... (what else) ... sex.
The Mother is May (Anne Reid), whose stable but otherwise dull life is shattered by the unexpected death of her husband. She dreads returning to her home for she would only find the slow death of loneliness, so she stays with her children but not to their delight. Her daughter Paula (Cathryn Bradshaw) dislikes her for being condescending towards her. Though her son Bobby (Steven Mackintosh) is accomodating, his wife Helen (Anna Wilson-Jones) is not. Then she meets Darren (Daniel Craig), a builder Bobby hires to build a conservatory at the back of his house, and a married man who is secretly seeing Paula. May later asks Darren about his affair in the hopes of putting an end to it. One thing leads to another, and soon May and Darren are in each other's arms.
Every woman has needs, even those of May's age. Something's Gotta Give proves that there is nothing wrong or repulsive about an older woman engaging in romance the way young couples do. (The only problem with this is Hollywood's obsession with youthful-looking women that affects public's attitude towards older women and romance in films.) The Mother takes it a step further by leaning towards the sexual aspects. To put it plainly, Darren and May's lovemaking activities are hot and heavy. Reid's unglamorous countenance works effectively in making the affair believable instead of a mere fantasy-esque romp. She conveys very well the emotional turmoil beneath May's veil of sweetness in dealing with her daughter's disdain, which is only amplified by the discovery of the affair.
But it is not so much of May making out with her daughter's boyfriend that is remarkable. It is the negative attitudes showered upon her by the young women - daughter Paula and daughter-in-law Helen - and the children's general indifference. Only the men - son Bobby and lover Darren - exhibit any cordiality. As a stab to Hollywood films, where the older men usually gets the girls (but not vice versa for older women), the only senior male character Bruce (Oliver Ford Davies), whom Paula wants to hook May up with, fails to satisfy both romantically and sexually. Despite his best efforts to woo May with attention and praises, Bruce proves to be nothing more than a tired, worn-out machine in the bedroom. No offense to senior citizens, but older men aren't as virile as Hollywood portrays them to be. But older women, almost always neglected in cinematic stories of romantic or sexual conquests, are shown to be just as sensual and desirable for companionship as their younger counterparts.
Though a necessity for the story, the occasional plodding pace can be taxing on patience. The dialogue recording could use some work. It is jarring to the ears at times even though the actors are not speaking very loudly. Other times, it is almost nondescript - difficult to hear exactly what Helen and Bobby are arguing about, or that Paula wanted to break up with Darren at the start of their affair (according to synopsis notes).
If there is a reason why the idea of a woman old enough to be your mother (or granny) making out with a younger man is perceived to be digusting, it is only because we have been conditioned - be it by contemporary cinema culture or social norms - to believe so. Fortunately, this group of women does not have to feel neglected because films like Something's Gotta Give and The Mother can speak to them and for them. No one is ever be too old for love (or sex).
L'Apprenti, 15th April 2004
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