Roger Michell knows how to direct, and Hanif Kureishi is a serious screenwriter.  Early in their 2003 British film, The Mother, a cocky carpenter, Darren (Daniel Craig), meets and chats with an elderly man called Toots (Peter Vaughn) while ignoring Toots’s aging wife May, played by Anne Reid.  Subsequently we see dark scenes of a life winding down: Toots dies of a heart attack.

For her part, May feels lost, refusing to stay in her marital home, moving in with her fragile, unmarried daughter Paula (Cathryn Bradshaw).  Fairly desperate, Paula is crazy about Darren, a spoken-for man living apart from his wife.  Critic David Edelstein is right about the film’s reminding us that “neediness never dies.”  May’s doesn’t.  Correspondingly she too is drawn to the carpenter, and Darren learns of this.  The man who ignored her earlier now takes her to his bed, despite the big age difference.  Paula finds out about the betrayal, and naturally the result is more frustration, more self-pity, more suffering than have already occurred.

May and Darren do not genuinely conduct a love affair, and although May might be in love, Darren assuredly isn’t.  With anyone.  He has in common with May the fact that he is somewhat of a castaway.  Meanwhile, Paula believes she is simply a loser, no good at anything.  A self-absorbed loser, this woman.  And her mother, by the way, can be as decidedly selfish as Edelstein says she is.  These people are not angels.  They face their own wretchedness.  Kureishi does not let them off the hook.

The Mother cannot be acquitted of a certain sensationalism, or of unpleasantness.  Even so, it is a potent movie about impotence: May’s, Paula’s, etc.  It doesn’t have much of an ending, but the rest of it holds its own.  And, er, the sex stuff is well managed.  Before Reid’s breasts and Craig’s buttocks are revealed, the couple lie in bed, slightly out of focus, in the background while thin curtains fly in the constant wind in the foreground.  No sensationalism here, at least.

Cover of The Mother

A screwball item, The Bride Came C.O.D. (1941) is stale in several ways and obtuse in several others, but you could certainly do worse for sight gags and one-liners.

It tells of a charter pilot (James Cagney) hired by a tycoon to keep the latter’s daughter (Bette Davis) from marrying an unsuitable man.  The grand prevention requires the use of an aircraft. . . The best thing here is Davis, fully committed to her role.  Now classy, now sexy, she is also necessarily and beautifully buoyant.  As for Cagney, he was ever the cheerful man’s man; it’s no surprise that he finally became a political conservative.

Cover of The Bride Came C.O.D.

An elderly couple visit their grown son and daughter and widowed daughter-in-law in Tokyo Story (1953), the great classic Japanese film directed and co-written (with Kogo Noda) by Yasujiro Ozu.

The couple’s children are harmless people who are nevertheless not as generous and attentive to their parents as they ought to be.  The daughter-in-law, Noriko, is generous and attentive.  Work and immediate family prevent the son, a doctor, and the daughter, a beautician, from experiencing the loneliness and isolation consistently imposed on the characters who have had, or are having, these life-enriching realities stripped away from them.  The parents are among these characters, and Noriko is too.  With scant opportunity to genuinely love her husband before he died in the war, she remains idiosyncratically loyal to the man but also secluded and not really living.  On this particular subject—loneliness and isolation—Tokyo Story, though a quiet film, is shattering.

(In Japanese with English subtitles)

Cover of Tokyo Story – Criterion Collection

I saw the film version of The Humbling (2014)—Philip Roth’s novel, which I reviewed on this site—on DVD the other day.  Barry Levinson directed the picture imaginatively and Al Pacino is extraordinary as the malfunctioning great actor who gets involved with the strange lesbian (Greta Gerwig), but the undertaking would have been better had the film been a little more faithful to the novel.

Buck Henry and Michael Zebede wrote the script, and I disesteem Henry’s attempts at arch comedy.  For a transsexual character, the ex-lover of Gerwig’s lesbian, to be tossed in is pointless, and the tragic ending is more garish, less believable, than Roth’s ending.  The film could have been a memorable success, but in truth it is too eccentric to even register as something disturbing and important.

The Doris Day mode continued as late as 1968, the year of The Graduate, with Dean Martin and Stella Stevens in the romantic comedy, How to Save a Marriage (and Ruin Your Life).

Eli Wallach is superb as a fiftyish man who cheats on his wife.  His buddy David Sloane (Martin) thinks he has proof that the adulterer’s mistress (Ann Jackson) is fickle, so he tries to save Wallach’s marriage by making advances to her.  But he does so to the wrong girl (Stevens), not the one involved with his friend.

Not far behind Wallach, Stella Stevens is lively and endearing—and drop-dead beautiful.  Martin, on the other hand, is inadequate, but Jackson and some others aren’t.  They’re authoritatively comic.  Fielder Cook’s directing is not quite good and not quite bad, notwithstanding, despite unsatisfying characterization, Marriage contains dollops of wit and some tasty humor.  It’s flawed but entertaining.  In addition, mainly a family pic, it’s hardly sexy at all, released only a year before such films as Goodbye Columbus and Last Summer, with their naked bodies, appeared.