'The Mother' review Issue #20

directed by Roger Michell

By Rebecca Flint-Marx
Published: June 1st, 2004 | 12:00am

Cinematic portrayals of the older female libido have always come with an unspoken ultimatum: if you can’t show it with humor, don’t show it at all. So while a septuagenarian Clint Eastwood and weak-chinned Michael Douglas get to be virile, the over-45 female gets to be either Ruth Gordon in Harold And Maude or Blanche in The Golden Girls.

This is one of the reasons why The Mother is more or less a quiet revolution — and like most revolutions, compromised by some serious flaws. The story of May (Anne Reid), a recently widowed mother of two grown, deeply unpleasant children, The Mother is a portrait of both familial dysfunction and erotic awakening.

After May’s husband dies, she moves in with her son’s family and finds herself, for the first time in her life, receptive to her own sexual longings. The catalyst is Darren (Daniel Craig), a builder who is working on May’s son’s house and dating her daughter. What happens when these two get together is both all too familiar (a doomed relationship) and unnervingly original.

Although two other recent films, Calendar Girls and Something’s Gotta Give, put post-menopausal flesh on display, The Mother does so without a hint of glamour or levity. Helen Mirren flashing her breasts in Calender Girls was emphatically nude; Reid doing the same thing is naked, in the fullest sense of the word. Her sex scenes with Craig are liberating, mundane, and terrifying, which makes it even more disappointing when the movie around them unravels.

Ultimately, all of the care Michell and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi lavish upon their characters gives way to an attempt to shove the film toward an unnecessarily climactic ending. May’s desire is what surfaces above the melodrama; her entreaty of “Dear God, let us live before we die,” is one as universal as the need to lie next to another human beings under clean sheets in a hushed, still room.