Review: The Mother

You won’t be able to take your eyes off Anne Reid, whose performance is a thing of rare beauty.

The Mother
Photo: Sony Pictures Classics

Hanif Kureishi, who wrote the screenplay to Roger Michell’s The Mother, has a way of bluntly tapping into the core of human pain and ecstasy, two sensations often indistinguishable from each other in Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette and Patrice Chéreau’s Intimacy. Kureishi’s use of contrast is playful, and though his prose is heavily anecdotal, it never sounds showy. The romantic imbroglios that drive his novels and screenplays present difficult cultural challenges to both their characters and their audiences.

The Mother begins with May (Anne Reid) and her husband, Toots (Peter Vaughan), traveling to London to visit their grown children. After Toots’s sudden death, May falls for the married handyman, Darren (Daniel Craig), who’s working on her son Bobby’s (Steven Mackintosh) home and sleeping with her demanding daughter, Paula (Cathryn Bradshaw), who uses her father’s death to unearth old wounds. The film is a daring work, not because of the May-September romance at its center, but because it illuminates a dark psychological terrain between parents and children and lovers of two vastly different ages.

After Toots’s death, May tells Bobby that she’s afraid to sit down at the risk of never being able to stand up. It’s a heartbreaking sentiment. Her husband’s death tempts her to give up on life, but her perpetually busy and disinterested son trivializes her emotions. “Why shouldn’t I be difficult?” she yells at him, the first sign that she may not be ready to give up on life.

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There are many such moments in The Mother, and all of them contemplate a sad disconnect between the old and the young: Just as the cries of a young child seemingly summon Toots to his death, the sound of a young couple having sex lifts May from her funk. “What do you see, a shapeless old lump?” says May to Darren, who makes her feel wanted by willingly reaching out to her in the way her own children won’t. Pity, then, that Michell shoots the material as if it were a spread for Modern Living. His aesthetic is cold, impersonal, and self-conscious in the same way that Kureishi’s script is raw, honest, and unpretentious. In essence, Michell directs like the very prude Kureishi loathes. Though the film almost demands to be heard rather than actually seen, don’t take your eyes off Reid, whose performance is a thing of rare beauty.

Score: 
 Cast: Anne Reid, Daniel Craig, Peter Vaughan, Steven Mackintosh, Anna-Wilson Jones, Cathryn Bradshaw, Danira Govich, Harry Michell, Rosie Michell  Director: Roger Michell  Screenwriter: Hanif Kureishi  Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics  Running Time: 112 min  Rating: R  Year: 2003  Buy: Video

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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