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The Mother
**
Cinema
Review - December 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. UK.
112 minutes. Directed by Roger Michell. Produced by Kevin Loader. Written
by Hanif Kureishi. Starring Anne Reid, Peter Vaughan, Anna Wilson-Jones,
Daniel Craig, Danira Govich, Harry Michell, Rosie Michell, Izabella Telezynska,
Steven Mackintosh, Cathryn Bradshaw.
Nobody wants to be a whining desperate failure,
or a husband surrounded by work, or a nagging perfectionist wife. Nobody
wants to become old and alone, finding that life has passed by, and we never
did find the time to pick up rich interests that would carry us through the
years. But we live in immediacy. We live in the hours, these hours, now.
It's hard to see ourselves from the outside when locked in our own heads,
and if we're careless, we find ourselves one day blinded by the realisation
of what was really going on, and asking if that's all there
is.
That's what "The Mother" is about,
at first. It looks in on lives, sees the true sadness as people are too busy
wading through the details of routine to be who they want to be. Anne Reid
plays May, an old lady whose husband has just died. She goes to live with
her son for a few weeks. He's a businessman, keen to finish renovations on
his swanky London house and close the deal he's working on. Nearby too is
May's daughter, a single mother and struggling writer who desperately hopes
that everything will be alright tomorrow, but will worry about it with a
glass of wine for now.
The son tries to be a nice guy -- to balance the
needs of his work and his family, to be accommodating to his mother without
being functional or cold. But he's busy, and there's only so much you can
keep on your plate without losing sight of something or gaining a touch of
the phoney. The daughter struggles her way through misery, hoping for romance
in the obsessive and selfish way that certain desperate thirtysomethings
do, and later in the movie blaming her mother for never showing any interest
in her work. Maybe she's right, maybe she's shifting the blame, but she sure
is too nasty about it either way.
The camera style is subtly voyeuristic; it holds
back, seeing its characters flounder amid a lot of open space, and it is
accompanied by a soundtrack that is realistic and unrefined, letting footsteps
make shuffles and voices echo. It takes the point of view of May -- she has
nothing else to look at but the truth of what is around her, no more routine
to keep her cosy or lose her in an illusion of the future.
It's touching, and it's involving, and the style
is sort of televisual, but still quite impressive. At some point the plot
takes a turn into an odd romance: Daniel Craig plays Darren, one of the son's
old college pals, now working odd jobs including labour on the house
conservatory. He is a strapping chap -- muscular, upright, with an edge to
his eyes and voice that lets you know he's an eternal loose cannon. May and
him talk. They go for walks on the beach. They sketch each other. When the
house is empty, they go to the spare room.
There's more to the situation, but why should
I bother discussing it? Although the love affair is one of the most interesting
parts of the film, and the angle used in the advertising, and the thing that
all the journalists have been talking about, it's not the final subject of
the picture. "The Mother" goes crazy in its last third -- without giving
too much away, I can say that the love story ends abruptly and nastily, and
from then on there is a festival of people acting selfish, cruel and
crazy.
Maybe every human being really is an animal in
a pointless role, and there's nothing for us after all our pathetic conventional
distractions are gone, and this world is sleazy and lonely and warped. But
I don't go to the movies to be told that. I can tolerate bleakness, if it's
something sobering and thought-provoking like "Do the Right Thing" or "Requiem
for a Dream". But what's the point here? That we can try to reality check
and move on, we can try to grasp happiness, but in the end it's all going
to blow up in our faces? Gimme a break.
The writer is Hanif Kureishi. I don't know enough
of his work to know his outlook on life; I saw "My Beautiful Laundrette",
don't think I saw "My Son the Fanatic" and saw "The Buddha of Suburbia" when
it was first on TV, so damned if I can remember it. But you'd think for a
guy who became famous dealing with ethnic outcasts and scuzzy parts of the
capital city, there'd be some dogged hope on offer. His last two works were
this and "Intimacy". One wonders how he got so grim. One does not approve,
and suggests a weekend in the Bahamas and a shedload of
Prozac.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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