Review: MRS LOWRY & SON

Biopics are mostly stillborn. Whether we already know the lifestory or not we can guess that at some point we are in for a kind of cinematic pageant, a roll out of great moments in the life of. In those cases (i.e. most of them) what began as cinema in the opening credits turns into an expensive slide show. Others mine the biography for life lessons and can acquit themselves as movies. And then there are others still that find universality beneath the peculiar and give us a story we didn't know but feel better for knowing. Mrs Lowry & Son is such a film.

This two-hander about the bond of mother and son frequently strains at the vulnerable points and willingly tests the patience of the characters and we their witnesses. That is effectively what it is about. Mrs Lowry, abandoned while still young with a small boy has forgone an imagined career as a concert pianist and has reached old age as an invalid, bedridden and bitter. Her son Laurie, a rent collector, is her sole carer (it's the 1930s and there is no National Health). He is also a painter. His motif, from the get go is that he is a man who paints, nothing more, nothing less.

Laurie goes about his days struck with wonder at the sight of the life around him. Be it ever so dowdy and breathlessly industrial he can see its beauty and quietly puts that on canvas by night in the attic of the two-up two-down she shares with his mother. His mother feels she has sunken below her station and her son's art with its emphasis on commoner-filled streets, smokestacks and miners, fills her with dread that others might see it. It takes a visit by a better-off neighbour to see one of the works for the beauty it holds. She is unimpressed by the attention of a London gallery owner whose letter, she says, could be filled with lies.

If you're thinking a kind of Beckett dialogue you're getting the idea. This might well have been a play for its confinement to a few rooms but the cinema comes from deft handling of this, its contrast with the world of stone grey and colour outside and the sense that there is a kind of quirkiness that can bleed from ancient wallpaper and seep into the light. What stops it from Becketting like a boss is warmth.

Vanessa Redgrave is both weary and tireless in her snidery and outright attacks on her son and his art. Her mouth when closed forms a kind of bleached family-sized anus of tight wrinkles that might open disastrously at any turn. Her eyes burn like dry ice. But this is a continuum, her levity, too, is sincere. Indeed, when she falls into moments of happiness it seems almost unintended. In receipt of this constant chipping is the great Timothy Spall whose aged Mad Hatter face wears the weight of his job's misery but lights on sight of the extraordinary in a day. And at moments of great stress, the screams almost tear through him.

Performances like these are crucial to a film like this. There are dramatic phases to it but they are not cut like the usual acts. Like the Lowrys' shared sentence of a life the moments come as they will, needing no further agency than a word of kindness here or bleakness there. Given the subtlety of Adrian Noble's direction, two lesser lights would see this film implode (it might by itself if Craig Armstong's soporific score had its way).

Mrs Lowry & Son is not a long film at ninety-one minutes but it is demanding. If you have a care you will be guided in by a masterful cast and see if you don't go googling LS Lowry's paintings afterwards. That, finally, is the beauty of this film: you meet the force of the people and their impact without ever asking if this or that happened quite that way. This is not a slideshow but an immersion and what better way than that to share a life?