Some Mother's Son
Alleva, Richard
Richard Alleva CHARACTER AMID CHAOS 'Some Mother's Son' Home Mother's Son, the latest movie about the everlasting Irish troubles, manages a singular feat of equipoise. It is both angry and human,...
...Higgins, Fionnuala Flanagan, who, two decades ago, played Molly Bloom to Zero Mostel's Leopold in the Broadway production of Ulysses in Nighttown, has become something very rare: a credible earth mother...
...The cross-cutting between some girls stomping out a folk dance at school and a terrorist-police collision is of TV movie banality...
...Once delicately beautiful, Flanagan's face now has massive, granitic strength...
...Learning that the resisted arrest has left an English soldier dead, Mrs...
...To be used as an unwilling conduit for information is to be used as pure means...
...And how has she become a criminal's mother...
...Taking the directorial helm for, as far as I know, the first time, Terry George as yet lacks the gift for staging violent action that his collaborator Jim Sheridan demonstrated in In the Name of the Father...
...Quigley denounces her son's rationalization of the killing as a casualty of war, insisting that the dead man, too, was "some mother's son...
...Nor can we, for the director has cannily turned off the soundtrack to let us feel what our heroine experiences: the complete loss of faith in men who can only use other men as bargaining chips...
...Higgins (Fionnuala Flanagan) not only approves of her son Frankie being an IRA member, she even runs errands for the terrorists...
...It is both angry and human, politically partisan yet emotionally just...
...Though there are several scenes inside the prison dramatizing the protest, the burden of the film is to show the two women exploring all possibilities of relief available within the state, the Catholic church, and the political underground, thereby making startling discoveries about the mortal consequences of politics and even more startling discoveries about themselves...
...Higgins of her action, the latter replies, "Somebody had to do it...
...Her little boy starts to hurl a rock but his mother stops him...
...But most of the story is experienced through Mrs...
...She's already lost one boy to British bullets...
...Higgins has a hard time maintaining her vision of her enemies as subhuman...
...When both boys (strictly fictional characters) take part in the true-life prison hunger strike that made world headlines in 1981, the mothers work together, first as uneasy allies and later as mutually supportive friends...
...The climax of the movie presents a withdrawal from that nightmare...
...Quigley the free agent...
...Though intensely political themselves, Terry George and Jim Sheridan have made a movie that, in some sense, despairs of politics or, at least, of a politics that can't embrace life but only uses individuals as stepping stones to power...
...she sees their lips move as they scream out their demands and refusals, but she cannot hear their words...
...This room can't be a real place in her life, can it...
...Whether or not she can save her imprisoned child, Mrs...
...Yet George is already a master at inventing images that show what people are thinking...
...Quigley and the working-class Mrs...
...Quigley is treated not as a person but as part of a lawless sea of bodies...
...Higgins, by contrast, though equally anxious to save her son, can't conceive of any satisfactory conclusion but the defeat of the British and the Protestant Irish...
...And to be used this way by her own child, whose total existence issued out of her total existence, turns Mrs...
...The law-abiding Mrs...
...To be sure, held up for contempt are Margaret Thatcher and her policy of treating IRA prisoners purely as criminals rather than as prisoners of war...
...With her there is no ostentatious roughness or strenuously manufactured peasant dignity, but rather the suggestion of an internal fortress erected by years of suffering, brooded-upon wrongs, constantly imperiled mother-love...
...But why is Mrs...
...Then she does something that turns her son from such a bargaining chip back into a human being...
...Quigley is about to enter the prison's visiting room for the first time, Mirren communicates more than the mother's worry and concern for her son...
...In short, what Mirren does in a few seconds is to give us a taste of the nightmare that her character is just about to enter...
...That is her moral position: no murder is justified by political expedience...
...When Mrs...
...When a courtroom is roughly cleared by police fearing a riot, our heroine is treated as part of the mob...
...Tire blow-outs sound like gunshots...
...Because Mrs...
...Quigley has saved her soul...
...She becomes sensible to the possibility of violence breaking out anywhere, any time...
...Quigley hears a radio report that the very member of Parliament most likely to aid her son has died of a heart attack...
...Near the end of the movie, when she and her children are taking part in a protest march, the police break it up and once again Mrs...
...As Mrs...
...Quigley finds herself drawing perilously close to the political arm of the IRA, Sinn Fein, while Mrs...
...ordinary buildings can (and do) house underground cells...
...She must fight her way home by holding onto the deepest knowledge that is in her, the knowledge that no matter what ideals individuals choose to serve, they themselves, like all humans, are always more than the ideals...
...Everyone in the cast is good but all depends upon the two female leads, and they prove without fissure...
...Why is Mrs...
...Quigley sees the faces of priest and terrorist and politician flushed with anger...
...all life is sacred...
...You're lucky you had the choice...
...But the real subject of writer Jim Sheridan and writer-director Terry George is the way a riven land produces emotionally riven people, and how such people, trying to mend their torn lives, find themselves making strange alliances and going to unwonted places, geographically and psychologically...
...Higgins...
...But before the soapy rivulets turn into a corny metaphor of dissolving hopes, Helen Mirren's strong face comes out of shock and composes itself into lines of determination...
...But Mrs...
...Quigley (Helen Mirren) is dumbfounded when her son Jared is arrested for participating with Frankie in an act of sabotage...
...What has her son to do with crime and prison...
...She will do something...
...She pauses in the doorway and looks about the room in disbelief...
...Forced into the company of police and terrorists, she feels a sudden estrangement from order and sanity...
...What the music critic Alex Ross recently wrote of a Kurt Weill opera perfectly describes this film: "The scenario contains politics, but it does not hawk them...
...Briskly, she wipes the window clean and clear...
...But it's a granite that can turn into suffering flesh at any tragic moment...
...Quigley's eyes since it is the woman without ideology who is more observant of what is going on around her and can respond with greater flexibility to the possibilities thrown her way...
...By contrast, Helen Mirren's face and talent are always the most delicate of registers...
...Quigley can still see a man inside a uniform and can stop a child from stoning that man...
...She freezes as the water streams down the glass...
...When she informs Mrs...
...Washing a window, Mrs...
...Quigley into an exile from her own conception of herself as secure mother of a stable family...
...Higgins without choice...
...She won't let him stone a uniform because there is a man inside that uniform...
...At the movie's center are two widowed mothers: the music teacher Mrs...
...Though not necessarily against Irish independence, she's perfectly willing to work within the legal status quo to mitigate her son's punishment...
...Her son's affectionate farewell kiss in the prisoners' visiting room turns shockingly oedipal as he presses his lips on hers but, no less shockingly, the seeming passion proves only an attempt to shift a secret message from his mouth to hers so that she may transmit it to IRA headquarters...
Vol. 124 • February 1997 • No. 3
