As a novelist and as a screenwriter, Hanif Kureishi has always been intensely interested in sexual relationships, particularly unusual ones. If there are some socio-political issues to throw in, so much the better. There was the striking pairing of punky white boy and son of Pakistani immigrants, set against the backdrop of Thatcher’s Britain, in My Beautiful Laundrette (1985); the title of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) speaks for itself. More recently, Intimacy explored the precise fault line between sexual gratification and emotional need.
These are all scripts Kureishi has written; he has been lucky, too, in being able to pair up with directors as accomplished and daring as Stephen Frears and Patrice Chéreau. His new movie, The Mother, is directed by Roger Michell, known more for commercial hits such as Notting Hill than for deep, serious drama.
And yet that’s what Kureishi and Michell give us. This is kitchen sink drama in every possible way, except the kitchen sink here is most likely to be Ikea. Kureishi’s take on social mores in The Mother, though played down, are there: the relationships in The Mother are inflected, albeit subtly, by class.
The scene is principally the London home of Bobby (Steven Mackintosh) and Helen (Anna Wilson-Jones), a home they are busy remodelling. The work is being done by Darren (Daniel Craig), who was allegedly at university with Bobby, but seems an altogether rougher sort. The house under (rather desperate) reconstruction serves as a neat metaphor for the situation as it develops. Kureishi’s early work as a stage dramatist is serving him well here.
Initially, we approach this milieu from the viewpoint of Bobby’s parents, Toots (Peter Vaughan) and the ironically named May (Anne Reid), who are coming to stay, with all the little familial tensions that that foreshadows. Such concerns vanish, however, in the light of the bigger familial trauma that strikes almost at once. Toots dies and May, at sixtysomething, finds herself alone. Though she’s in her son’s home, he is obsessed solely with money; and her daughter (Cathryn Bradshaw), with whom she also stays, is estranged and embittered. May strikes up a liaison (let’s put it delicately) with —guess who? — the builder doing the house revamp, Darren.
Thus The Mother plays out as meaty drama, shot in a minimal, elegant style by cinematographer Alwin Küchler and guided unobtrusively by Michell. The story is heated but the visuals are cool — an intriguing contrast. Reid gives a stunning central performance without overplaying her hand. It’s pretty engrossing (if depressing) stuff.
Yet it has a hole in the middle of it. Darren is an enigma; as a character with a life and feelings, he’s practically absent. Darren is forcefully and attractively played by Craig, and he’s a strong physical presence, but we know too little about him to understand why he should want to get involved with this ageing, needy woman. There are hints of ulterior motives, toward the end, but nothing to really let us (even briefly) inside his head, and this destroys the ending and resolution of the movie. Dramas like this are more satisfying if you can see things from different people’s points of view, and if you know why they’re doing what they’re doing.
In this case, Kureishi and Michell have made a gripping and often moving film. Most of The Mother feels solid and real, very human — and then there’s a certain area, let’s call it the unbuilt room of Darren, that is barely inhabited at all.