Redgrave is great – but this Lowry portrait is painting by numbers
Mrs Lowry & Son PG Cert, 91 min Dir Adrian Noble Starring Timothy Spall, Vanessa Redgrave, Stephen Lord, David Schaal, Wendy Morgan, Michael Keogh
The last time Timothy Spall went at it with a paintbrush, it was for Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner in 2014, a figure (and role) who could hardly contrast more with LS Lowry, the now-famous, long-obscure Salford artist he plays in Mrs Lowry & Son. Sadly, the comparison with his performance as the English Romantic painter is unfavourable. His twinkly turn as Lowry comes at us with heavy sighs and chirrups and winsome smiles to camera: it’s so eagerly ingratiating you can hardly get around it.
Adapted by Martyn Hesford from his own play, this is a very modest British production you want to be better on a number of levels. As a two-hander it has some tension and promise. Lowry spent the middle years of his life toiling with no recognition in the attic of a two-up, two-down, while cooking, cleaning and caring for his bedridden mother Elizabeth (Vanessa Redgrave). Press interest and public acclaim never really arrived until her death in 1939; the film suggests that her stifling influence, belittling personality and hilarious distaste for Lowry’s paintings consistently put him off making a go of things.
“You find things beautiful no one else does,” she snips at him in one scene, unaware that this intended insult would become the main
basis for his later appreciation. In fact, Redgrave’s performance finds a bedrock of comic misery that undeniably scores. “I haven’t been cheerful since 1868,” is a good enough line already, but her way of rinsing it for every last ounce of glum certainty brings Beckett to mind. She’s an unsparing nightmare, even when doling out faint praise for her son’s cooking (“You can’t go wrong with prunes and custard”).
If only Adrian Noble, the RSC alumnus whose third cinematic outing this is, had found ways to explore their relationship less tepidly and stop dishing out PR for Lowry so slavishly. If the camera had any dynamism, the idea of these two drowning together in their bric-a-brac could have been mesmeric, but their interactions are often botched: close-ups of them shouting to each other around the house feel like they were done on wholly different days of shooting. And dissolving in and out of a sailing scene (“a gift of the past”) to images of Lowrian childhood bliss on the beach is mawkish and mismanaged – exactly the kind of sentimental touch you know is coming.
Because the film is so reluctant to take any formal risks, it cushions itself with needless amounts of nagging music as a safety net, 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. With Spall all but winking to us over his shoulder at the end, it’s not so much a biopic of Lowry as a flyer to suggest a visit.