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Mrs Lowry & Son – Film Review
Kay Carson • 4 February 2020
When contemplating a film about a British artist as celebrated as L S Lowry, with a stellar cast including Timothy Spall and Vanessa Redgrave, you’d be forgiven for presuming that nothing could possibly go wrong – and, in all fairness, it doesn’t. The problem is that there is nothing much to
go wrong. Simplicity overshadows substance in this portrait of Manchester’s most famous artistic son.
Redgrave is impeccable as Lowry’s embittered, ailing, elderly mother, Elizabeth, whose permanent state of dissatisfaction with her lot in life is summed up perfectly in the line: “I haven’t been cheerful since 1868.” And we can believe it. She takes delight in reading her son a scathing newspaper review which deems his work “an insult to the people of Lancashire.”
“Why do you do it, Laurie?” she whines. “Painting these squalid, industrial scenes that nobody wants to buy!”
Lowry, meanwhile, is depicted as a simple man who earns a modest living as a door-to-door rent collector by day, whilst diligently pursuing his artistic dream by night, painting prolifically into the small hours. Aside from playful interaction with children in the street, and weary tolerance of his mother’s incessant demands and put-downs (“You’re not an artist and you never will be”), we are not privy to deeper aspects of his character. Perhaps this is somewhat intentional, to echo the
sketchiness of the artist’s faceless stick figures; but the fact that Mrs Lowry & Son was originally created for radio undoubtedly plays a part. The narrow focus is distilled into essentially a two-hander, most of which takes place in his housebound mother’s bedroom. Salford-born writer Martyn Hesford’s dialogue is on-point throughout but – ironically for a film about an artist – the visual aspect is almost entirely unnecessary.
That is not to say there aren’t visual references to his work: we see the Pendlebury and Salford landscape of the 1930s as Lowry painted it, hilly and grey with smoking chimneys, and there is an amusing cameo of ‘Woman With Beard’ when he describes the whiskered woman he once encountered on a train journey. The most aesthetically impactful scene is when the artist walks amongst a live tableau of mill workers, describing these “lonely souls” in his signature paint colours of ivory black, vermillion, Prussian blue and yellow ochre. It is also the closest we come to a rare confession that perhaps Lowry did not always feel comfortable in his solitude.
Mrs Lowry didn’t live to see her son’s achievements. She died in 1939, just months before he secured his first major exhibition in London. On that note, the film ends; but the epilogue – a brief, present-day tour of the Lowry collection at the Salford gallery complex bearing his name – is jarringly incongruous and seems like a hastily edited afterthought which only serves to unravel the period scene-setting of the previous 90 minutes.
What feels to be missing, though, is a sense of the revelatory. There is no mention, for instance, of the risqué works of art discovered after Lowry’s death. His friendships with other artists are also glossed over. The title says it all: this film centres on Mrs Lowry and her son, a man destined to become a respected member of the British art scene but whom she regarded inconsequential and misguided.