MATCH STICK MAN ... AND HIS MUM
In a moving portrait, Timothy Spall and Vanessa Redgrave bring artist L.S. Lowry and his monstrous mother to life
MRS Lowry & Son chronicles the relationship between the painter L.S. Lowry (Timothy Spall) and his domineering and snobbish invalid mother (Vanessa Redgrave), long before anyone, let alone the two of them, had an inkling that his sooty townscapes and ‘matchstick men’ might one day be worth millions.
It’s set in Pendlebury, Lancashire, in 1934 — in a world of fussy doilies, frilly lampshades and vanilla slices.
I loved Mike Leigh’s 2014 film Mr Turner, in which Spall played the great 19th century artist J.M.W. Turner. As you might expect, he’s no less captivating as Lowry, a very different painter and a very different man, meek but kind-hearted, revelling in his games with the neighbourhood children, and entirely in thrall to his monstrous mother, Elizabeth.
The film, by illustrious theatre director Adrian Noble, making a rare foray into cinema, never really attempts to smudge its origins as a radio play. This somehow both enables and disables the narrative, making it at times almost laughably ponderous. A scene in which ‘Larry’ takes his mother a cup of tea is eked out for so long that other films would fit in a battle and a victory parade in the same time.
Yet the pace also allows Redgrave to act her bedsocks off, and Spall to inhabit the character with his customary excellence.
A few of Martyn Hesford’s lines serve a little too much as a nod and a wink to the audience — ‘You’re not an artist and you never will be,’ says Elizabeth, criticising Larry’s ‘squalid industrial scenes that nobody wants to buy’. But there are a few ripe chuckles, too.
‘What does he know about art?’ she sneers of the man next door. ‘He’s a socialist.’
A FRIEND asked me only last week why nobody seems to make really good crime thrillers any more.
The kind with a corrupt cop or two and maybe an undercover
guy in fear of his life. The kind that might still be recalled fondly a generation or more later, such as Witness (1985) or LA Confidential (1997).
I couldn’t argue with his asserlex tion that multiplex audiences don’t really want an overwhelm ing diet of super hero movies, crash-bang-wallop sequels and live-action remakes of Disney animations, with only the odd rom-com or biopic to leaven the mixture.
But wait. Here’s THE INFORMER, also packed with talent, to
remind us that the corrupt-cop thriller genre isn’t face-up in the morgue just yet.
And while it might not be in the same league as LA Confidential or Witness, it’s a genuinely tense, gritty, New York City-set drama with a compelling leading man in Joel Kinnaman, and solid support from Rosamund Pike, whose fragrant English Rose period is now just a distant memory.
SHE plays FBI special agent Erica Wilcox, handler of an intrepid undercover man called Pete Koslow (Kinnaman). Incidentally, it’s odd how frightfully middle-class English actresses keep being cast as hard-as-nails US Feds.
Emily Blunt filled a similar role a few years ago in Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario, which come to think of it was another exception to the rule that classy cinematic crime thrillers are a thing of the past.
I wonder what it is that makes casting directors looking for the kind of hard-boiled American women that used to be called broads, call on the likes of Pike and Blunt? Maybe they discern an inner steel beneath the
prettiness, forged out of the capable stoicism of all those female forebears making their own marmalade and sending their officer-class men off to the wars.
Whatever, Wilcox is another tough cookie, inflexible and even unscrupulous in the pursuit of bad guys. But Koslow is the one taking all the mortal risks.
He is a Gulf War hero, who returned to civilian life with post-traumatic stress disorder and ended up doing a jail term after killing a man in a bar fight for abusing his pretty wife.
Then he was sprung from the notorious Bale Hill prison by the FBI, on the understanding that he would use his skills to go undercover in the Polish mafia. Koslow’s job for the mob is to shepherd drugs, smuggled into the US in a diplomatic bag, through the Polish consulate in New York.
Once he has helped to nail the nasty Mr Big masterminding the operation, he will be absolved of his responsibilities to the Feds. But then a drug deal goes disastrously awry, ending in the death of a police officer. The crime boss blames Koslow, who, by way of penance, and with his beloved wife and daughter held as bargaining tools, must become an inmate again at Bale Hill in order to take control of drugs distribution there.
The Polish overlord will not only make vast sums of money from needy prisoners, but can also manipulate them when they come out.
So Koslow returns to the prison he worked so hard to leave, which is OK because he has the FBI to protect him, or thinks he does.
Wilcox’s boss is a treacherous cove played by Clive Owen, although the sneaky Feds might just have met their match in a determined NYPD detective (played by the rapper Common), who is investigating the death of his colleague in the botched drug deal.
Originally, this film was titled Three Seconds, after the novel by the Swedish author Anders Roslund on which it is based.
The Italian director Andrea di Stefano has adapted it skilfully, with help from screenwriter, Rowan Joffe.
That’s an admirably multinational team behind a film that feels not just distinctly American but carries that particular whiff of New York City underbelly, of sweat and pretzels and acrid steam rising from subway gratings.