This is a very self-contained film, as easily happens with direct conversions from stage plays, particularly when they really only have two characters in a single room. It's simply the story of the idiosyncratic Lancastrian painter L.S. Lowry looking after his bed-ridden elderly mother as he struggles to get out from beneath her smothering yoke, and there is no relief for him just as there is no relief for the audience either: we are as trapped as he is in the never-ending cycle of his self-sacrifice to an insecure old woman who has always sought to crush his artistic dreams under her class-based notions of proper art and deportment. Thus the story keeps on revolving around the same ideas, and this would be an insurmountable hindrance, were it not for the casting of Timothy Spall and Vanessa Redgrave in the roles, who breathe such life into the fractious relationship that the obvious dramatic limitations of the script are surmounted.
You do find yourself thinking at times, though, now that Spall has been Turner and Lowry, which iconic English artist someone is still thinking about asking him to represent.
6/10
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