E-Mail This Article to a Friend Mommie dearest The Mother delivers its message BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
	The Mother Directed by Roger Michell. Written by Hanif Kureishi. With Anne Reid, Daniel Craig, Cathryn Bradshaw, Steven Mackintosh, Anna Wilson-Jones, Oliver Ford Davies, and Peter Vaughan. A Sony Pictures Classics release (112 minutes). At the Kendall Square.

I’m not ready for old age," realizes newly widowed suburban grandmother May (Anne Reid). To prove it, she moves into the London flat of her daughter, Paula (Cathryn Bradshaw), and sets about undoing a half-century’s quiet desperation by embarking on a passionate affair with Paula’s boyfriend, Darren (Daniel Craig), a rugged carpenter half May’s age.

In treating a subject — the sexuality of women of late middle age — on which there is still a taboo, as far as media representation is concerned, The Mother makes a statement to which all viewers of good will can comfortably subscribe: that it’s good for a woman in her 60s to experience sexual desire and satisfaction, and that there is nothing wrong, in principle, if her sexual object happens to be much younger. On this ground, Rainer Werner Fassbinder tread vigorously in 1974’s Angst essen Seele auf/Ali: Fear Eats the Soul; and one of that film’s insights was that late-capitalist society is quite willing to let its old widows take young husbands as long as it can go on exploiting them.

The Mother is less incisive, though as a what’s-wrong-with-Mum’s-having-it-off tract, it makes its point. Writer Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, London Kills Me) and director Roger Michell (Notting Hill) have conceived this romantic relationship in general terms: in their scenes together, May and Darren are just an older woman with a younger man. On her own, May, sensitively played by Reid, is passive, stolid, and a little complacent, and the film keeps its distance from her. It’s significant that we don’t see her making the pornographic drawings that mark a late stage in her progressive casting-off of the slough of patriarchal oppression; instead, we see the drawings at the same time as her children find them and through their eyes, with their shock and embarrassment. The film too seems, if not embarrassed by May, at least unclear about what to do with her after it’s set her up as a poster child for senior sex.

The most interesting character here is Paula, a white-wine-tippling, therapy-coddled failed writer who punishes herself for her feelings of inadequacy by having an affair with a married man. Paula’s scenes with her mother, whom she accuses of having caused all her problems, elicit the film’s sharpest acting, writing, and direction. That we never learn to what extent her grievances against May are justified is a strength of the film — this ambiguity complicates and deepens May’s character and opens up the movie’s social critique by hinting that women’s victimization may be a matrilineal inheritance.

Literary and fastidious, The Mother deals in metaphors that might suit a novel but come off as solemn and overprotected on screen. The house that May’s son is renovating — not to live in, but to sell off so that he can fund his failed entrepreneurism — provides a too convenient metaphor for the hollowness of the ideal of family solidarity as this family embody it. May’s rediscovery of life and sex finds its image in the sunlit conservatory on which Darren, London’s slowest carpenter, labors throughout the film. This vision of rebirth gets shattered in a literal manner — a payoff that’s as transparent as its set-up.

An abrupt, no-nonsense director like Fassbinder might have put the film over, but Michell’s visual preciosity mars the proceedings. With its precarious framing, its gauzy lighting, and its shallow-focus flourishes, the cinematography has an ostentatious fussiness that pads rather than undercuts the script’s triter side. Still, The Mother remains valuable for showing May’s entrapment as a social fact and exploring its determinations, internal and external. The death of her husband frees her, but it also leaves her, by the end, directionless and more alone than before. A film dedicated to the honest examination of this process compels respect.