Mrs Lowry & Son started life as a BBC radio play by Martyn Hesford (who adapts here), but sadly Adrian Noble’s film has little ambition to transcend its talk-y traditional roots. Despite boasting two heavyweight actors in the leads, it feels both inert and dismal, hitting the same tonal register for the majority of the running time, never bringing the artist or the art to life.
Essentially set in one bedroom, Mrs Lowry & Son charts the unhealthy relationship between meek Lancashire artist L.S. Lowry (Spall) and his domineering mother (Redgrave). A rent collector by day, Lowry spends his evenings at his easel and taking care of his bedridden mother. Mrs Lowry’s existence consists of bemoaning her fall in social standing or ruminating on what a disappointment her son is, diminishing his artistic talents at every opportunity. Yet Lowry sees a way out of his toxic situation when he receives a letter from London inviting him to to showcase his work in an exhibition. At some point mother and son will clash.
A visually repetitive film that can’t find a way to make the characters’ surroundings comment on or enhance the drama.
Any film that pairs Spall and Redgrave can’t be all bad. Spall, of course, delivered a tour de force portrayal as another artist in Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner but he has very different raw material to work with here. Lowry is a subdued, subservient, downtrodden figure and while Spall inhabits the character, he never illuminates Lowry, allowing us to see a man who can find magic in the mundane. Redgrave has some fun playing bitter and belligerent but again doesn’t really reveal different colours or nuances.
Noble, better known as a theatre director, finds the odd arresting image — kids creeping up behind Lowry as he walks through cobbled streets — but it’s a visually repetitive film that can’t find a way to make the characters’ surroundings comment on or enhance the drama. It’s also static emotionally, Hesford’s script never finding interesting shifting dynamics within the relationship to escalate the drama. In some ways the film feels like it could have been truncated into the first act of a Lowry biopic; by the end, the more interesting stuff seems just about to begin.