Mark Reviews Movies: MOTHERING SUNDAY

Mothering Sunday, Sony Pictures Classics

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 31, 2022

Much of the story of Mothering Sunday is about the internal and unspoken. In it, a pair of families mourn, refuse to speak about or even acknowledge their grief, and exit this narrative in a state of being seemingly doomed to exist in that manner. A young man also finds himself in a position of constant pressure to live up to the promise that the dead were unable to fulfill, and how much that has affected his life is a matter of which he will not speak—even to the one person he knows will not judge him.

Of most significant position in this story, though, is a young woman, a servant and an orphan, who lives among these pained but silent people. She spends a good portion of this movie roaming around, exploring, and examining the country manor of one of those families in the nude, which is an on-the-nose metaphor—for her comfort in this setting, an act of rebellion against her station, and her general lack of defense—that probably worked better on the pages of Graham Swift's novel, since it becomes an increasingly amusing distraction when literally visualized.

The nudity itself isn't the source of the amusement of distraction. It's in the odd irony that director Eva Husson's movie shows so much of its protagonist's body, while only hinting at the more relevant point here: the workings of her mind.

Part of that, of course, is the point, since Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young) has worked in such an estate since she was 14. There are behaviors, attitudes, and ways of carrying oneself that she clearly has learned from the family for whom she works, as well as their friends at this wealthy and mannered level of society.

The Nivens, Godfrey (Colin Firth) and Clarrie (Olivia Colman), don't talk about much beyond the weather and their plans, for example. As the grieving parents of two sons who died in the Great War, they don't speak at all.

Alice Birch's screenplay, with a lot of help from the performances by Firth (his kind eyes filled with sadness) and Colman (her hard exterior serving as a protective shell), is admirable in how it establishes the emptiness of this family and its root cause, without directly referencing the loss until much later. Obviously, there's the timing of the story, which primarily takes place on Mother's Day in the UK in 1924. There's also the way in which our learned or inferred knowledge of these great losses forms a pattern of how these characters act and talk—or, more often, don't talk—about such uncomfortable matters.

Jane is the same in many ways. She keeps her ongoing romance with Paul Sheringham (Josh O'Connor) a secret from everyone. On this particular day, Jane's plans to be alone in the manor, since the Nivens are meeting with their friends for a picnic, reading a book, but Paul calls and invites her to his family home.

They have sex, lounge around naked together in his bedroom, and talk about love and loss with about as much openness as either can bear. It's not much, of course, but through those few words and in juxtaposition with an assortment of flashbacks, the images of naked skin, the manor and its expensive ornamentation, and the idyllic landscape out the window take on shades of vulnerability, mourning, and absence.

This underlying mood is the movie's most significant strength, although Young, as a naïve young woman who becomes hardened as her place in the world constantly changes, and O'Connor, offering just a tangible hint of melancholy beneath his character's seemingly laidback attitude, are quite complementary to that atmosphere. When Paul eventually departs to join the picnic with the Nivens and his parents (played by Craig Crosbie and Emily Woof) and a woman (played by Emma D'Arcy) who has become one of those expectations for his life, the story loses, not only one of its most honest sources of insight into this lifestyle and way of thinking, but also its main source of drama.

The rest of it revolves around Jane, as she wanders the house on this day, recalls various moments of her relationship with Paul and Godfrey's gentle acknowledgement that she's more than a servant, and exists in a future life. Sometime later, she is an aspiring author and romantically involved with Donald (Sope Dirisu), a philosopher. The 1924 story, it seems, is both real and the piece she's currently writing (When Donald asks if she really said a certain thing to Paul, she replies that she didn't). It's meant to be a thriller (In a certain way, it is, with the possibility of someone finding her naked in the house or, later, finding out that she had been there), but the relationship and its fate have been on her mind. She has to deal with it, and in that story's present tense, Jane has to confront another inevitable loss.

The back-and-forth narrative (which finally includes one more leap ahead in time, with Glenda Jackson as an older Jane) is ultimately more of a hurdle than a way of showing Jane's evolution within these parts of her life and over time. Life and time take their toll on her in Mothering Sunday, but the mood and method of this story keep all of that a thematically appropriate but underwhelming distance.

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