The Mother (2003)
Average Rating: 7/10
Reviews Counted: 88
Fresh: 68 | Rotten: 20
Reid gives a fearless, realistic performance in depicting an older woman's sexual blossoming.
Average Rating: 7.4/10
Critic Reviews: 34
Fresh: 30 | Rotten: 4
Reid gives a fearless, realistic performance in depicting an older woman's sexual blossoming.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.3/5
User Ratings: 2,971
My Rating
Movie Info
Hanif Kureishi wrote this drama about a woman whose late-blooming romance causes a serious rift with her family. May (Anne Reid) and Toots (Peter Vaughan) are an elderly couple who travel to London to visit their two grown children, Bobby (Steven Mackintosh) and Paula (Cathryn Bradshaw). While Bobby tries to be attentive to his parents, he's busy with his two young children, a major project at work, and completing some renovations on his large and expensive house, while his wife, Helen (Anna
Cast
-
Anne Reid
May -
Daniel Craig
Darren -
Steven Mackintosh
Bobby -
Cathryn Bradshaw
Paula -
Oliver Ford Davies
Bruce -
Anna Wilson-Jones
Helen -
Peter Vaughan
Toots -
Harry Michell
Harry -
Rosie Michell
Rosie -
Danira Govich
Au Pair -
-
Carlo Kureishi
Jack -
Sachin Kureishi
Jack -
-
Jonah Coombes
Estate Agent -
Simon Mason
Man In Tate Gallery -
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All Critics (94) | Top Critics (35) | Fresh (70) | Rotten (20) | DVD (10)
A troubling film about the need to be wanted.
Top CriticThere is in The Mother a rich understanding of where old age takes you. Along with the myth that seniors don't have sex drives, the film dispels a larger one: that the years bring wisdom.
It challenges you to figure out how you feel about the people on the screen -- emotionally, intellectually, morally.
The Mother never fails to engage.
It sounds like the stuff of soap operas or bad porn, but Kureishi's script is too intelligent and empathetic to titillate.
Uses the surface familiarity of its situation ... to smuggle an elegantly carved Trojan horse full of messy emotional spillover into the theatre.
Isn't very exciting or involving.
A bold, challenging performance by Anne Reid.
...extremely well-played in individual scenes. But much of the film feels counterintuitive to the general thrust of the narrative.
Michell [allows] the audience to suspend what is likely the most vehement of disbelief and to start feeling that this odd relationship is, in fact, rather sweet.
Yes, folks, people over 50 still like to get their groove on.
Complex characters, constrained emotions, an intelligent screenplay and a candid, audacious examination of the burgeoning sexuality of a woman in her 60s.
This is a very solid little film that would be perfect to those of you who are beyond tired of this summer's attack of mindless entertainment.
...hard to watch but it as honest as it is emotionally grueling.
This British drama gets increasingly lurid as it goes. And its handling of risque material is sensationalistic, even exploitative.
Director Roger Michell shoots in stately poses that are artful to the point of distraction.
It's a superb character study, with veteran actress Anne Reid delivering a heartbreaking and curiously liberating performance.
Audience Reviews for The Mother
It does an expert view of showing a woman, May, who had never really questioned her wifely duties (although, apparently didn't do that great a job of raising her daughter, who claimed she was never given the love and support she needed).
When May and her husband arrive in London to visit their children, it seems like the world is going on around them and they can only watch. When the husband dies, May refuses to live in the family home, so comes to London to live with her children. She begins to feel the freedom and the breathtaking concept that she can now do what she wants, when she wants - and ends up taking a lover with none other than James Bond (Daniel Craig), who is a carpenter working on her son's flat.
The sex scenes come across very real and poignant, especially May's confession that she felt that she might never be touched again.
The tension comes from the fact that Craig is May's daughter's lover. The daughter is a needful thing, always turning the conversation towards herself (even while saying to May, "enough about you, what about me" - yikes!) - and their struggle over Craig fills the remainder of the film (all done in subterfuge and typical Brittish upper lip).
When all the plot devices collide and May is forced (though it appears to be her choice) to return to the family digs - she walks through her son's house, much as she entered it - with their lives going on around and without her. Undeterred, she is home just long enough to pack her bags so she can take a cruise; thus getting on with her life and continuing to "become", rather than waiting to die.
Super Reviewer
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It's not the older woman/younger man set up, it's not the elderly nudity. No, what bothers me is that a mother could do that to her own daughter. Not to mention how Darren treated the poor old woman.
I could feel her pain and fear of becoming yet another "invisible old lady whose life is more or less over", but the way she went about fixing it just wasn't right.