Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

The Mother is one of those films that you know is good, maybe even great, but it is like eating vegetables or doing math homework is to a kid - too much work and a whole lot of pain to get invested in.The story is potentially distasteful in many ways: the death of a character within the first half hour, the December-May romance, the idea of a man cheating on his wife and then cheating on his lover with her mother, the collection of weak and rather unpleasant thirty-something characters, the apparent indifference of the adults to the children in their lives. This movie was made in the 2002 or 2003, but is a throw back to a collection of British (usually made-for-TV) movies from the late 1980's - it has a moral severity that never lets up, which produces an enveloping throbbing angst.The Mother is flawless, but that is in part the problem; if a film dealing with so many sensitive issues has some flaws - inconsistencies of script, some lesser actors - it takes the edge off, but if such a film is so pitch perfect, the experience of watching it is raw and painful. Even the technical qualities - lighting, editing, etc. - make the viewer ache; the London in this movie is bright and open, filled with harsh, cutting light.If you are tough as nails, or are one of those super-sensitive people who likes to torture themselves with gut-wrenching sad movies or novels, then you will enjoy The Mother. Anyone in between, give it a miss, or be prepared to squirm. And be warned: as tough as the movie is from beginning to near-end, the worst is to come.Toward the end of the movie, the mother asks her daughter what she can do to make up for it (for having slept with her boyfriend), and the daughter calmly says that she has thought about it and would like to hit her. The mother agrees to this, they both stand up, and - instead of a well primed slap - the daughter clenches her fist and delivers a boxer's blow. Argh!!!

May and her husband go to visit their children and grandchildren. The visit is awkward because the grandchildren and "kids" don't really seem to know each other as one might expect. The warmth that should be there is missing. After dinner, May's husband says he doesn't feel well, blames it on his daughter's cooking, and irritably says he wants to go home. He dies that night.May, now a widow, is lost. She clearly did not have a passionate marriage or a very interesting one, but she had a purpose. She had someone who needed her, and even though her own needs had gone unmet for years, she had something to do with her days.She is depressed and unmotivated. She goes to stay with her daughter, Paula, who shortly after her mother's arrival, lets her mother know that she has never felt that her mother has given much of herself at all. She lets loose with anger over her mother's lack of nurturing. May seems disarmed and surprised, yet she also doesn't seem to have the energy or the desire to really make it right. "I'm your mother and I love you." What does really say? (I've heard this from my own mother way too many times and have yet to figure out what it means.) Paula is a bit (well, more than a bit) neurotic. Both women are needy, though they show it very differently.Paula has been involved with a friend of her son's, Darren, who is a handyman working on the house owned by her son. While Paula is working during the day, May begins to have conversations and lunches with Darren. Darren is a married man who has stayed with his wife because of their autistic son, Nicky, but supposedly doesn't live in the home with his wife.May becomes attracted to Darren because he is virile and she enjoys the connection they seem to have. Darren becomes attracted to May because she offers a kind of peace and understanding that he does not get from the other women in his life. (He also becomes too interested in money that May says she can give him to "get away from it all," though he is clearly not interested in her desire to join him on such a journey. They end up sleeping together in the spare room during the day, and May enjoys fulfillment as a woman that she has not known in years, nor had ever expected to know again. As her daughter Paula had often told her that she would leave the married Darren, this becomes part of May's rationalization that what she is doing is okay.At a writing group that Paula leads, May is introduced, rather forced to get together with a widower to whom she is not attracted. There is one scene where she has sex with the older man, who clearly can barely perform, and it truly painful and unsettling as we see the total disgust on May's face as she endures the one-time ghastly liaison.Eventually, Paula discovers through some very graphic sketches done by her mother, that indeed her mother and Darren have been having sex.This film will undoubtedly be seen by many in myriad ways. Sympathies will be divided. At one point, during Paula's writing group, May reveals through a short essay that she used to feel as though she hated her kids by the end of the day, and would leave for pubs after they were asleep, making sure to get back home before her husband.Clearly, a good mother does not think of leaving children alone while she goes off to the local pub. May, however, also had revealed earlier in the film that her husband didn't like her having any friends, so she didn't have any. She did what he wanted her to do. She was miserable but she put up with it because, as she said, "it was easier." So, while May was not the best mother, for those inclined to have any sympathy for her, one might see May's actions as the act of a woman just wanting to be sexual and to be a live for "a few minutes" in her lifetime. A woman who just wanted someone to listen to her, to know her as a human being, to have a friend and a lover.Paula, though neurotic and unhappy, perhaps has become that way because of the distant parents who raised her. Certainly, it is not difficult to understand why Paula feels completely betrayed by her mother.It is a well-done film, with more complexities than I have mentioned, and certainly one that will leave the viewer with many, perhaps conflicting, reactions. It is a film worth discussing and debating, and above all, worth seeing.One thing the film leaves us with is the horror and fear of a lonely life. No matter who is deemed "right" or who is deemed 'wrong" by each viewer, that theme of old age and loneliness, evoking a sense of dread in most of us, is inescapable.

Anne Reid and Daniel Craig are very good in this movie. The whole thing was kind of hard to watch because, sex aside, there wasn't much fun going on and all of the people in it have serious problems with life and with each other. It was believable, and Reid did have serious problems adjusting to life without her husband even if she has happy enough to see him go. But she didn't have enough going for her as a person to make the movie more satisfying. She didn't care for her kids when they were young, and was very self-absorbed, and even though she did the minimum to keep her kids safe, they now show little care for her. If she would have been a really good artist, for example, or have some other more successful social aspect, then the attitude she showed towards her children would have made the movie more interesting. As it was there was an element of boredom throughout the film that made it uninteresting to watch.

"If I sit down I will never stand up again", that's what the mother (the one of the title) says to his son when he tells her to get some rest (she's just widowed). He means that resting is what a woman of his age and in her situation has to do: to rest in peace, to neglect herself. But she's not in the mood for "resting", not yet. She also has a daughter who reproaches her for each and every disasters in her life... Suddenly, the revelation comes: sex and passion in the figure of a muscular carpenter 30 years younger than her (Daniel Craig, the brand new James Bond) when she "thought nobody would ever touch her again". It is a story that makes you reflect on many things, specially on what's a 60 something woman is supposed to do with her life when his husband dies. It doesn't look that we've advanced that such in those aspects. I mean, nobody's surprised when Sean Connery has a love affair in a movie with Catherine Zeta Jones... but what would you think if it was otherwise? An old woman, a young guy... nah, you ain't ready for that, are you?The movie has intimist tones all along its length, except for 2 or 3 sequences in which that tones breaks and out comes some explicit and foul-mouthed dialogs. Those vulgar touches and the way the son and the daughter find out their mother's love affair (pretty absurd -you'll know what I mean when you watch it-) are the only discordant elements in "The Mother". *My rate: 7/10