Irish director Darren Thornton returns with his enjoyable comedy, Four Mothers, a film that won the London Film Festival’s Audience Award. At the heart of the film is young adult fiction writer, Edward, played with intelligent humanity by James McArdle. Edward is on the cusp of a career breakthrough, having written a buzzy novel that’s about to be picked up by the American market. His publisher is arranging a promotional tour in the US and Edward is being invited on the radio to talk about his work. Sounds great, right? However, he is also the full-time carer of his mother, unable to walk or speak after a stroke and played to silent comedy perfection by Fionnuala Flanagan. But she’s not completely on mute, as her new voice tool app is loud enough to be picked up on live radio as she offers hilariously unhelpful pointers to her exasperated son.
Edward laments his situation with his similarly positioned single, gay and full-time carer friends who have all taken their mothers to mass and are frantically whispering at the back of the church. They all need a break. One of them gets a video message of a sun-drenched party at Maspalomas Pride in Gran Canaria. So here is found the film’s premise, as Edward’s three friends drop their mothers at his house and skip off for some R&R in the Canaries.
Four Mothers is based on Gianni Di Gregorio’s 2008 comedy, Mid-August Lunch, in which a man living with his elderly mother ends up looking after three other older women as well. But Edward’s stresses are not mounting debts as in that film, but the anxiety that comes with a countdown to a career milestone that looks increasingly impossible to achieve. In practical terms, the house is full of mothers so Edward is squeezed out to sleep in the car, where he underperforms in more promotional interviews. Thorton has co-written the film with his brother Colin in a continuation of their creative partnership since their first feature, 2016’s A Date For Mad Mary, and the pressure they put their main character under is so relatable it plays for empathetic, watch-through-your-fingers laughs.
The four mothers of the title are miffed at having been lumped together, and perhaps due to some tight pacing the film never really gives them their own breadth of character, despite some emphasised differences. Visually, apart from one incongruous shot of a beautiful Irish landscape, the film avoids cliché and uses the portrait form of phone screens to meaningful effect, accentuating the emotional pull of things happening elsewhere. But in one scene where the women discuss their late husbands, photos of the men are shown full-screen, lionising them. When Edward points out that perhaps the women worked just as hard but weren’t afforded the same advantages in life, his view is shrugged off. It’s a moment that makes you wonder if the film is more conventional than its main character.
But it’s McArdle as Edward that drives this film, giving a wonderfully well-rounded, measured performance of a wholly authentic character within a hugely talented supporting cast of eccentric mothers and sons. With skill and compassion, the Thornton Brothers have made another clever and lovely film that adds further complexity to on-screen representation of Irish life. Rose Baker
Catch Four Mothers at Light House Cinema, Dublin, Belfast’s QFT and Eye Cinema in Galway until 17th April.
