THE MOTHER

Year: 2003
USA: Sony Pictures Classics
UK: Momentum Theatrical
Cast: Anne Reid, Daniel Craig, Cathryn Bradshaw, Steven Mackintosh, Anna Wilson-Jones, Oliver Ford Davies, Peter Vaughan, Danira Govich, Harry Michell, Rosie Michell, Izabella Telezynska, Carlo Kureishi, Sachin Kureishi, Simon Mason, Jonah Coombes
Director: Roger Michell
Country: UK
USA & UK: 112 mins
USA Rated: R for sexual content including graphic images of sexuality, language and brief drug use
UK Certificate: 15 contains strong language, sex references and hard drug use
USA Release Date: 28 May 2004 (Limited Release)
UK Release Date: 14 November 2003

Synopsis

May (Anne Reid) and Toots (Peter Vaughan), a couple in their sixties, travel south by train to visit their children and grandchildren in London. The pace and scale of the city overwhelms them immediately and the urban chaos is reflected in their children's lives: their son, Bobby (Steven Mackintosh), is constantly on the mobile phone arranging his next meeting; their daughter-in-law, Helen (Anna Wilson-Jones), has just opened a boutique and barks orders at the nanny before racing out the door to sell luxury knitwear to her peers. The grandchildren are absorbed by their own activities, indifferent toward the old strangers who have come to visit. Adding to the daily confusion of this Notting Hill household is a building site and a pleasantly odd builder, Darren (Daniel Craig).

Toots and May also have a daughter, Paula (Cathryn Bradshaw), a single parent struggling to find time for herself and her creative writing. Her home, too, is under construction although the builder has been devoting more of his energies to his client than he has to refurbishing her spare room.

Following a family meal at Paula's flat, Toots can't sleep. He jokes that it's probably his daughter's cooking but later that night, Toots dies in hospital. He's had a heart attack.

Bobby takes his mother back North, but May has no sooner entered the empty house than she realises that she cannot stay. She tells her son that she is not ready to be a lonely, idle old lady like her neighbours. To the undisguised annoyance of her daughter-in-law, May returns to London.

Now living 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, that is, she falls for Darren, a man half her age who is renovating her son's house and sleeping with her daughter.