Mrs. Lowry & Son

The film has a small canvas (sorry), and it suffers from a certain determined ordinariness, but it is affecting in other ways.

The film has a small canvas (sorry), and it suffers from a certain determined ordinariness, but it is affecting in other ways.

It’s exhausting and unkind, and you start to long for more scenes of Lowry just picking up a brush and watching his paint dry.

The movie's origins in a play are fairly clear. As ever in films about great painters, the work takes second place to the details of his daily life. There's more soup than paint here.

Spall and Redgrave excavate every iota of meaning from the pages and get it shimmering up on the screen. In lesser hands, maybe Mrs Lowry and Son could have been a mite depressing, or even worse, "worthy". There's no danger of that here. In its best moments, this film crackles.

Within three or four short exchanges she establishes Mrs Lowry as one of the great maternal monsters of cinema, up there with Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest or Piper Laurie in Carrie.

Under the direction of theatre veteran Adrian Noble, it's an often stiff and unadventurous affair.

Captivating but overly sentimental at times.

It cushions itself with needless amounts of nagging music, and winds up giving us a dainty little tour of the Lowry museum in Salford, where we can presumably expect the DVD to be sold until kingdom come.

If often sad and unsettling, the film is also livelier and less oppressive than it may sound thanks to the fine writing, deft direction by Adrian Noble, and the superb, if painful interplay between Redgrave and Spall.

Both Spall and Redgrave feel stifled and stiff-jointed, hemmed in by a thin, shallow-focus script that betrays its origins as a radio play all too easily.

An entertaining showcase for two first-class performers.

It all feels like an uneventful, overly stuffy approach to a painter who was, after all, considered outlandishly strange.