The Mother

I watched the film for TV “The Mother” last night (BBC2), which starred Anne Reid of Coronation Street fame (so I am led to believe), which endeavours to portray the life of a sixty something woman whose husband has just died. The film got off to a somewhat slow start and I found that I was having some difficulty in keeping track of who, what and where, despite the slow pace. Put it down to my age I suppose. Not a lot was said about the husband (still alive at this point) but the impression given was certainly that he should probably already have been in a home, and that his wife was long suffering and had been his support for a long time.

After his death, brought on we must conclude by the stresses inherent in living for a while with their son and unsympathetic daughter-in-law and children, the mother slowly surfaces and recognises that her life has been a total waste. There are some pretty tortuous scenes whilst she seeks some comfort from her daughter who is having an affair with the builder (heart throb Daniel Craig) of her brother’s conservatory, and for whom the mother herself develops a fancy. This is reciprocated it transpires, because of the chance of getting his hands on her money, but by the nature of things everything goes pear shaped, and by the end everyone has acrimoniously gone their separate ways; the mother shown in the final shots is walking away from her home with her passport and holdall, heading for an airport we presume, to take her away to some exotic location where she might find a new sole-mate (with bed).

In general, I would say that the film was enjoyable, but some of the questions raised were somewhat disturbing to someone in the same age bracket as the mother, and brought up in the same era. I would hope that I was never quite like the husband portrayed here and that my wife has never considered herself to be the doormat that Anne Reid acted. I suppose that there must in reality be many women for whom the feminism movement never arrived, and similarly many men who never became “modern”. I shall however be vetting any builders who step over our doorstep very carefully!

Looking around, I would say that the price of achieving the freedoms sought after by this film have been very high. Women now, it would seem, have many of the same freedoms as men to make the same mistakes as men, but have relinquished the safety net offered by men in the past. Or am I being sexist or chauvinistic in still believing that men have a roll in protecting women; whether they like it or not.