Mrs Lowry & Son

Lowry was a few things: rent collector, painter, introvert, mama’s boy. Of these four categories the last defines him best. Mama was everything to him, central to all his concerns. Papa was gone and there were no siblings. Papa was no good: jobless, shiftless, a selfish deadbeat. Anyway, he wasn’t around. He shuffled off, did a runner early on, stranding wife and child.She had high hopes, Lowry’s mum did. She was beautiful and elegant (she thought). She played the piano. She loved classical composers. If Manchester wasn’t much, it still had Victoria Park, a place that defined her.But they went down in the world. The Great War had won little. It felt like it never ended. Poverty, suffering, unemployment. Slums, ill health, foul air. The north was ugly. That’s what the slag heaps of capitalism had done to it. But it’s all — or at least most — of what Lowry knew. He never ventured far from it, although he loved the sea. The moors also attracted him. He loved their greenery because green is the colour of life. But he rarely painted life. He preferred the look of death.It’s why his work is sad and bleak. Loneliness can do that, and if nothing else, Lowry was a solitary figure. His matchstick men are him: anonymous, faceless, isolated, even in — or especially in — a crowd. It’s what industrialism does: it turns people into workers; it divides and conquers communities. It destroys by creating jobs. The people hate their jobs. They trudge to them. Some go down the pits. Others just bluster through boredom. Most or many drink. Some hit their wives. Some just hit the road, as Mr. Lowry did. The boy became a mama’s boy because Mama was his only friend.He painted for her. He wanted to say he loved her. He put all his love, if love (among other things) is honesty, truth and beauty, into his paintings for her. Yes, he saw beauty. He felt it. Amid the filth and squalor and ugliness, he saw beauty, and because the paintings reflect this beauty they make him beautiful. We know that now. Most then didn’t. They were tired, fed up, unhappy. There was little room for art, or what they thought art was. Art was somewhere near Victoria Park, with that set. Or art was in London, that mythical land somewhere in the south. It wasn’t here, not here amid all the smoke and grime. So Lowry was out of place and time. He didn’t belong. Yet this was home, the place he knew and loved best, so here is where and what he painted. He painted what he saw, but the vision was his, no one else’s. That’s the trick. Be yourself, the source of what’s there. Otherwise it’s all mimicry, imitative, derivative. So he did it his way, a way few could understand. But that’s how it tends to go, judging from the history of art.What hurt most is what this poignant film shows: his mother didn’t understand. Narcissists seldom do, and she was one of those, a being wrapped up in herself, the centre of all things. Lowry was a burden to her, the child she never wanted. How do we know? Because she tells him so in the film. The art? Is that what you call it? Stick figures, childish scrawlings. Why can’t you paint something beautiful? People don’t want this. It’s ugly. They don’t want to see their ugliness.But she couldn’t understand because she wasn’t beautiful as her son was. He saw the beauty she couldn’t. Her ideas of the beautiful were borrowed and bourgeois. They weren’t hers. She didn’t feel them, just uttered them, made them clichés. She wasn’t artistic, just pretended to be. Her son was the opposite but she did not know this, did not care to know it.Yet through it all Lowry loved her. During her lifetime no major exhibitions for the artist, then all the awards later, no thanks. With Mother dead they meant nothing to him. He didn’t need ‘Sir’ next to his name. The idea even seemed an appalling mockery of life somehow. Perhaps it is, people just playacting at being important, hiding behind their names and titles. They die too, or didn’t they know that?He wasn’t even an artist, he said. He hated the word. He just said he’s a man who paints. And why did he do it? He had to, he said. It was a compulsion. He saw beautiful things. His job was to convey the beauty, to depict it. The French Fauvist painter Vlaminck said this: “If you’re a painter, you only have to look inside.” Lowry added:“You don’t need brains to paint, only feelings.”Both painters are right. They were honest. Beauty for them was not a word or idea; it was an emotion. Thus one paints as one sings, laughs or dances. Art is the joy of noticing beauty.Lowry carried on alone because there was freedom in it. No traditions, schools of thought, although he knew about them. He had his own methods, style. He started out as many do, dabbling in Impressionism, finding his way. No harm in that, because Impressionism is wonderful. But it’s someone else’s way, another voice or vision, not one’s own. One’s own is a secret buried within. There is treasure buried there and the artist’s job is to find the map. It’s the only way. All the rest is artifice, mimicry, aping. It isn’t art. It’s facsimile, a mimeograph, a waste of time.Lowry is great because he is himself. Every picture contains him within it. The isolation and loneliness are unavoidable because they are there. He doesn’t pretend otherwise. So when his mother protests and tells him to paint pretty things, things she can like, it’s spoken in an emotional language he cannot comprehend. He wants to please her but only can on his artistic terms. He can’t pretend otherwise. He can’t paint the pretty pictures she wants. He can still love her, but only as a son.And love her he does. Which is rather hard to watch, to be honest. Once in a great while she is nice. She will say something thoughtful or even gracious to him. It’s always some little thing: how the custard and cream with prunes tasted, or how nice the tea is. There is even one painting by her son she likes. Really? Yes. An early bucolic one, one perhaps inspired by Turner, a luminous one of the sea with sailing boats on it. A peaceful scene, quiet and serene. Beautiful light and reflections on the water.Lowry’s memories of the sea were positive. They sprang from childhood, a time when Mother was young and beautiful. He remembers the sand, salt air, warmth, his mother’s smile, or the way she would wear her hair up with pins. She was lovely, and so were those days. This painting contains that love and Lowry’s mother feels it, shares those positive memories from so long ago. Significantly, the father is missing at the beach. It is only Lowry and mum. Even then, during those periods of happiness, he was not around, it seems. He didn’t care. He didn’t love them enough.So it’s Lowry and mum, or as the title has it more aptly here, “Mrs. Lowry and Son”. It’s right that she should come first, as that is how Lowry lived it. We see what he puts up with her. His mum is tired, weary, bitter, resentful, in pain, always whinging. She’s an invalid now. It’s probably 1935. If so, she’s got four years left to live. Lowry is everything to her: cook, nurse, provider, housecleaner, doormat. And how does she show her appreciation? Largely with slights and insults. You’re no painter. You’re a dead loss like your father. This is no place to live. This is not Victoria Park where we should still be living. You’ll never amount to anything. Why don’t you take up a new hobby?Hobby! Hobby of course to Lowry is the greatest insult. Artists are not hobbyists. People who make balsa wood miniatures of airplanes are. So are stamp collectors or those with chemistry sets. Beauty doesn’t come into it. Mum should know this but doesn’t, so Lowry puts up with the insults. How easy it would be to spike her food with arsenic or kill her with something put into her tea. But he doesn’t do it. He doesn’t even think of it as far as we can tell. He’s loyal, faithful, dedicated. Flawed though she is, she’s the girl in his life.Actually, there were others. He liked a woman named Ann and painted her portrait more than once. But we never see her in the film. Amusingly, however, we see the famous bearded lady he painted. He saw her on a train and sketched her. She saw him draw her and was annoyed. But Lowry had warmed to her and the warmth of the sketch flowed into her. She understood that his intentions were somehow beautiful. He made her beautiful. The painting is amusing, that’s for sure, but there’s also love in it, an amusing, whimsical love. Being eccentric himself, perhaps he was attracted to the eccentric.But Mum just laughs at the absurdity of a bearded lady. Really? You saw that? You want to paint that? Why doesn’t she shave? Why go out in public looking like that? Has she no decency? Why make a spectacle of yourself?Some have complained that the film is thin and goes nowhere. There’s truth in both claims. I had expected as much, I suppose. There’s a deep problem with films about artists (and writers), and that problem is simple when you think about it. What makes an artist interesting? The art. And a writer? The books. But a drama can’t make a film about art and books. Maybe some good documentaries can, but not a drama. Dramas have stories to tell. That is their narrative purpose. So all dramas about artists and writers fail because they are bound to and must. This one of course does too.Any highlights in the story? One has to be when Lowry nearly burns all his paintings. Why? Mum of course. Another stupid thing she has said or done that nearly blows the lid off Lowry’s tangential remains of patience and sanity. He goes berserk. Who can blame him? She’s more than a handful; she’s a lifeful, and the wonder is how Lowry managed to put up with it in such lapdog fashion for so long.Ah, the ties that bind. Philip Larkin is often right on the subject of families, the rifts and problems that widen like a coastal shelf. Lovely, apt image. Lowry couldn’t undo them and her. Only death could, and, one might mercifully say, this occurred in 1939. Was Lowry happy afterward? Apparently not. He’d had a lifetime’s build-up of misery by the time death took his mum from him. He was set in his ways.He never married, never had children. But other geniuses, if we can call Lowry a genius, were that way. Newton, for instance, or Alexander von Humboldt. The asexual types, men caught up in passions that were not women. Strange to think for some, as I am not that way at all. For me women are glory of the world, the beauty in it, which probably comes from being the son of a loving mum.Am I too generous to give the film five stars? Many will say I am if they notice. Fine. They could be right. But I feel affection for this thin, slight film. I think it’s honest with how Lowry was, who he was. Timothy Spall, not always wonderful, is wonderful here. And Vanessa Redgrave is magnificent as the crass, whinging, self-important mum. It’s one long ensemble of dialogue between mother and son with almost no other actors appearing. So I’m not surprised to learn it was adapted from a stage play, which seems the perfect fit to me.When is Lowry happiest? You might say while painting, right? I would have said so too, but this is wrong. He is content while painting, at peace, even though it’s hard work. No, he’s happiest when he’s with children, who are kindred spirits. He gives the street urchins candies and coins. Why? Because it pleases them and therefore him. He is generous. They are grateful. The wheel is a perfect circle. All smile and laugh. Lowry is at his greatest out in the streets. There he finds his calling, sees his fellow creatures striving, suffering, enduring. There a crust of bread may fall or a few coins can jingle in the pocket. There a good smoke can be smoked or a pint of pale ale found in a pub. He loved the world and life and beauty. Of course he did. But to know this you have to look at the paintings with your heart as well as with your eyes, and that too, I have learned, is hard work.

Timothy Spell was superb in this film.

A very good film about a great artist who painted from the life of his surrounding s .

I bought this DVD as I am interested in LS Lowry and his paintings and rate Timothy Spall's acting highly. It is well named, Mrs Lowry & Son as it is mainly about LS Lowry's apparently toxic mother and how he puts up with her denigrating almost everything he does. Her sole aim in life seemed to be to do as little as possible herself - usually in bed - and remove any shred of confidence that her only son might have managed to build up. The acting was superb - as you might expect - but I found the whole thing depressing in the extreme. How he kept his temper most of the time is beyond me. I would have liked to see more of his actual art - like in Mr Turner - but sadly this was missing from most of the film. Worth watching for the acting and appreciating that Lowry seemed to be a saint most of the time but disappointing if you are hoping to 'watch' Lowry paint.

Brilliant acting throughout

I've been a big fan of Lowry for many years, watching anything on his life, buying merchandise with his work and I've even visited the gallery in Salford - so I was excited to watch this film. I thought the actors were good and the cinematography was certainly engaging. However, the sense I got was that they built an entire film around the narrative that Lowry wanted to capture the unseen and the beauty in the ordinary and even what others may see as the 'ugly'. Whilst this was a noble approach and certainly captured the uniqueness of Lowry for his time, it did start to get a little repetitive, as they regurgitated it over and over again. When you're the 20th time of them mentioning this point, it somewhat looses it's effect on you as the audience.Would I have still watched it? Yes. Would I watch it again? Maybe/no.

I enjoyed the film, it was exceptional acting, but if I'm honest a little slow.It makes you feel sorry for the artist, his mother was very ove bearing.

Good acting but nothing much happens.