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Mother, The
EMAILPRINTSony Pictures Classics
Generally favorable reviews
Based on 27 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 6 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama
Written by: Hanif Kureishi
Directed by: Roger Michell
Release Date:
Theatrical: May 28, 2004
DVD: October 12, 2004
Running Time: 112 minutes, Color
Origin: UK
Summary
RATING: R for sexual content including graphic images of sexuality, language and brief drug use
Starring Anne Reid, Peter Vaughan, Anna Wilson-Jones, Daniel Craig, Danira Govich, Harry Michell, Rosie Michell, and Izabella Telezynska
May is an ordinary grandmother from the suburbs. When her husband dies on a family visit to London, she recedes into the background of her busy, metropolitan children's lives. Stuck in an unfamiliar city far from home, May fears that she has become another invisible old lady whose life is more or less over. Until she falls for Darren, a man half her age who is renovating her son's house and sleeping with her daughter. (Sony Pictures Classics)
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Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas
Every element of The Mother, directed by Roger Michell and written by Hanif Kureishi, fits together with perfection. The film's staging -- the way its settings create a world that allows for striking images that echo the psychological interplay of its people, the way in which every performance could not be any better -- is awe-inspiring.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein
Daring in its affirmation that a dowdy woman in her late 60s still can let go of her inhibitions and exhibit a lascivious side.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Melissa Levine
The first exceptional drama of 2004, The Mother feels like life itself, sharpened to its finest points.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian M. E. Russell
Powerful, subtle, quietly terrifying film about the consequences of a widow's stab at a May-December romance.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin
Harsh, unsparing, unsentimental, and uniformly well-acted, The Mother bravely and intelligently tackles subject matter widely ignored in cinema--the sexuality of a plain-looking woman edging toward the twilight of a life of quiet desperation.
Read Full Review >Slate David Edelstein
It's a remarkable film--one to gnaw at you and keep you up at night.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
The Mother peers so fearlessly into the dark needs of human nature that you almost wish it would look away. It's very disturbing.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Marta Barber
You feel terribly sad and angry at May's foolishness. Yet with so many emotions at hand, The Mother never fails to engage.
Read Full Review >The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
This film holds and convinces, even evokes empathy, because of Anne Reid, an actress long experienced in British television and film. She gives May intelligence and spirit and a somewhat genteel wonder at the resurging of desire.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Stephen Holden
The screenplay bluntly faces anxieties of aging that are rarely voiced in the movies, and it is too hard-headed to offer comfy palliatives.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jami Bernard
Turns out to be a thoughtful, beautifully acted story about feeling alive before it's too late to feel anything.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
In reality, it's messy in the way that life is, and with a rare and welcome obstreperousness.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
Director Roger Michell (''Notting Hill'') conveys some of the sharpest insights into the woman buried beneath the wife and mother in those early scenes, using ragged, vérité-style camera work that takes merciless inventory of a certain stripe of posh, hard-edged modern family life in which dowdy grannies are invisible.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
Self-absorption is the vice of all these characters. That, not sex, is their sin--and Michell, Kureishi and their fine cast show this with a lucidity that cuts to the bone, a candor that draws blood.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Jennie Punter
The complications of its story are found in the deep complexities of emotions and family relationships.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
Finally, we have found ourselves in a movie where the characters are free to blunder, even if it means turning their backs on us. There's powerful liberation in that, all around.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Stephen Hunter
You may not enjoy The Mother (I certainly didn't), but it's a movie so heavy on truth, its spell cannot be denied.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Andrea Gronvall
Although this shares some of the acidity of Thatcher-era films, it owes more to David Lean's "Summertime" in its generosity toward an aging heroine who learns that any second chance is fraught with risk.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Dennis Lim
By turns expansive and astringent, The Mother is a portrait of a woman who, with the dazed courage of someone finally awakened to the world after decades of passivity and repression, keeps on walking.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
The film is marvelously acted all around, and the fact that there isn't a false note in the entire film is especially impressive given Kureishi's melodramatic contrivances and the fact that his characters are clichés whose behaviors are predictable at nearly every turn.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine Peter Rainer
There 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.
Read Full Review >New York Post Megan Lehmann
A promising film that is dragged down by the weight of its gray morbidity.
Read Full Review >Variety Derek Elley
A portrait of a contempo British family drifting apart because of generational differences, The Mother ends up an uneasy brew of too many competing tastes and themes.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Ella Taylor
The Mother winds up unpersuasive, in large part due to writer Hanif Kureishi, who visits on all his mopey characters such calculated savagery, it's hard to care much for them or to get onboard for the hope implied in the hastily stitched-on ending.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
There's not a vaguely sympathetic character in sight; Kureishi ultimately seems prudishly disapproving of his heroine's last gasp of sexual adventure; and what another writer might have found liberating and healing, he finds distasteful and destructive.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones
A certain inevitability hangs over The Mother – as if any of this could end well – but if Kureishi's framework is perhaps predictable, his knotty, complex characters are not.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 7.8 (out of 10) based on 6 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Evan S. gave it a7:
Wonderfully crafted, top-drawer acting with great grandma-on-007 action. While there's really no redeamable characters in this family drama, you're pulled into May's quest to stay alive when her self-centered adult children could care less. If it weren't set in a bright, lovely London summer, this tough picture would be relentless viewing.
Vince H. gave it an 8:
One of the most underrated movies of the year in my opinion. Both Anne Reid and Daniel Craig would get Oscar nominations if I had my way in the world, I'll tell you that. Roger Michell is one of the most underrated directors around and also one of the best working in Britain today (though he hardly gets the acclaim of say Michael Winterbottom, Danny Boyle, or Mike Newell). He made the only movie with an actually good Ben Affleck performance, Changing Lanes) and also directed the best Hugh Grant-Richard Curtis collab (Notting Hill). This is a daring art film that completely swerves away from melodrama and sentimintality at every turn. The film consistently delivers what you least expect and despite the plot, it never delves into cliche. Highly recommended to rent on video for those interested in one of the better British films of 2004.
DeWayne P. gave it an 8:
Incredibly moving film. When you're presented with subject matter that is digestible in its content, you can, and should, look past all the minute problems that a movie or any art piece has (because no art is flawless, really). This movie is more art than criticism, more story than script; go see it and enjoy the rich experience of good stories and the realities of life-isms.
Steve G. gave it a 7:
Despite some wretched continuity and the weight of some all too obvious symbolism, The Mother is a reasonably good film built around a taboo few movies would embrace. Can a mature woman, devastated by personal loss and without the support of her selfish family, fall for a younger man in the hope he will give something back? Ann Reid puts in a very good performance as the elderly woman going through a re-evaluation of her life though her much younger lover, Daniel Craig, never quite convinces - or perhaps never has the opportunity to reveal what he sees in this older woman. Reid is a forlorn stranger in a distant city and it is this metaphor that echoes most successfully. For all the good points it is however one of those films that could have been a stage play as most of the exterior scenes rarely help the plot along.
