added to my list of films to see this
summer is this one: the mother
globeandmail.ca
The Mother * * *
By JENNIE PUNTER
From Friday's Globe and Mail
The Mother
Directed by Roger Michell
Screenplay by Hanif Kureishi
Starring Anne Reid, Daniel Craig, Cathryn Bradshaw, Steven Mackintosh and Oliver Ford Davies
Classification: PG
Rating: * * *
British director Roger Michell is probably best known, on this side of the Atlantic at least, for the extremely popular Notting Hill, a romantic-comedy vehicle for a couple of movie stars. Based on the predictable, artificially sweetened and oh-so-rollicking rhythm of that film, one might easily assume that the director's latest, about a sixtysomething woman who begins an affair with her daughter's lover, is, well, Naughty Hill.
But The Mother, it turns out, is a far more subtle, thoughtful and satisfying piece of work. The complications of its story are found in the deep complexities of emotions and family relationships, as opposed to whether or not Hugh Grant can navigate his way through gnarled London traffic in time to declare his love for Julia Roberts at a crowded press conference.
The Mother was written by Hanif Kureishi, whose first two screenplays, My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, were directed by Stephen Frears, and whose Whitbread Prize-winning novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, was made into a four-part BBC-TV series and directed by Michell. Kureishi is also a short-story writer (his My Son The Fanatic was brilliantly adapted by director Udayan Prasad), and one can imagine The Mother taking that form, with its compact timeline intimately revealing the character of someone in limbo, on the cusp of change.
But the story's backdrop, the city of London (beautifully photographed by Alvin Kuchler), is put to significant use, turning The Mother into something much more than a small chamber drama.
When the recently widowed May (Anne Reid) takes the first of many long walks, she loses her way in the bustle of an unfamiliar multicultural neighbourhood, but later on, when she visits the London Eye and the new Tate Modern Gallery, you feel that the city itself is drawing her out, challenging her and, also, tempting her.
One feels the confinement of May's life in the opening sequence, as she helps her husband, Toots, get dressed. Barely two words pass between them as they take the train from their quiet suburban neighbourhood into London for a visit with their married son Bobby, a businessman, and his family, and their daughter Paula, a single mom and aspiring creative writer. In her children's noisy households, May almost seems like a ghost.
But when Toots dies suddenly of a heart attack, May decides she is not ready to return home, and starts to become a flesh-and-blood person to her son and daughter — with, as it turns out, decidedly too much flesh, to their bewilderment and horror.
While her children assume she is dutifully fulfilling the role of grandmother, May is discovering long repressed desires, both artistic and sexual. She strikes up a friendship with Paula's lover Darren (Daniel Craig), a builder, who is working on an addition to Bobby's house, and who seems to understand and accept May as a fully rounded person better than either of her children.
One afternoon, very matter-of-factly, May asks Darren to visit her bedroom. He obliges and an affair begins. May begins sketching him and making love with him during the day, while in the evening her relationship with her emotionally needy daughter becomes more strained.
When May's son and daughter finally sit down to decide "what to do with mother," they happen upon her sketch book, filled with nude sketches and depictions of what is obviously May and Darren in various sexual positions.
The somewhat violent resolution to this messy situation is not exactly a happy ending à la Notting Hill, but May's awakening to her inner life and what to do when she finally gets sent home gives The Mother the kind of satisfying conclusion that feels like a new and happier story is about to start.
Special to The Globe and Mail |
