A Date for Mad Mary director Darren Thornton has returned with another crowd-pleaser, Four Mothers.
There's a joke that captures the dynamic between Irish mammies of a certain era and their grown-up boys that goes something like this:
How many Irish mothers does it take to change a lightbulb?
None. 'Oh, don't you worry about me now, son. I'll just sit here in the dark by myself'.
It's an old gag that you may already know (or live), but when Four Mothers writer-director Darren Thornton is told that the push and pull of his new comedy-drama brings it to mind, he draws a blank and says he's never heard that punchline before.
Sure, the Drogheda man didn't need to; he and his co-writer brother Colin have better laughs in their new film, a sweet, salty, and sure-to-resonate slice of life about looking after elderly parents.
Winner of the Audience Award at last year's BFI London Film Festival, Four Mothers tells the story of Edward (James McArdle), a first-time author on the cusp of the big time who's billeted in his boyhood room taking care of his 81-year-old mother Alma (Fionnula Flanagan) after a stroke. Edward is just about keeping his sanity as he and Alma argue via the voice app on her iPad - and then three of his pals (Gearóid Farrelly, Gordon Hickey, Rory O'Neill) decide he's the perfect man to cater for their wayward matriarchs (Paddy Glynn, Stella McCusker, Dearbhla Molloy) too while they leg it for a weekend away.
As with all the good stuff that feels authentically lived-in, Darren and Colin Thornton wrote what they knew. They were back home themselves taking care of their mother Trish when an Italian movie called Mid-August Lunch, the misadventures of a middle-aged son hamfistedly but heroically minding his mother and everyone else's, fatefully found its way onto their watchlist. What the Thornton brothers saw in the Rome flat on screen clicked with their experience as carers, and they brought the story back home in more ways than one.
"It was a no-brainer," recalls Darren Thornton. "As soon as we saw it, we knew we wanted to do something with it, but we didn't want to recreate it the way that it was because it was its own perfect thing. There's a remake that we used to reference, a film by Jacques Audiard called The Beat That My Heart Skipped, which was Fingers (1978 American crime-drama). We talked about trying to do a remake that was like that, that was its own complete thing, and that was very specific to a different environment and a different time but that was based on this original thing."
They nailed it. Find the time for Four Mothers and you'll get to see Scottish actor McArdle pull off a flawless Irish accent, Fionnula Flanagan deliver one of her best performances while saying nothing, and a great supporting cast that will recharge your feelgood battery.
"I think that we thought the casting of the ladies would be a lot easier than it was!" laughs Thornton. "But then we realised that a lot of actors in that age range don't want to play roles where they have a limited capacity or where they're in a wheelchair because they feel like that's all they're going to get offered after that. Once they're seen in that way, then casting directors and so forth will just send them more and more of those kinds of roles. We got a lot of nice letters from people who really enjoyed the script but passed on the project. That was kind of interesting! We totally understood it then, but we didn't anticipate it."
"When we met Fionnula, she really wanted to be a part of it, but I think as it went on... I think she thought that there would be some dialogue!" Thornton continues. "The closer that we got to [filming] it, I think the more frustrated she got with the idea that she wasn't going to be able to speak. We'd a very brief rehearsal period, but once we got into the rehearsal and the other women had all this sassy dialogue, she found that kind of frustrating that she didn't get to speak and that she was going to be forced to use this device, which ended up being great for us! She was really frustrated about that and really frustrated with the device - the iPad would go bonkers and not work! - and that really fed into the energy of the film!"
For all the fun on screen, Four Mothers also performs a much-needed service: it reminds carers that moments of chaos and routine self-criticism affect everyone, and that part of showing up is going easy on yourself when things go awry. Darren Thornton realised that about his own experience while he was making the film, and he's delighted that others may now give themselves the benefit of the doubt.
"It definitely was cathartic and there definitely was a sense of relief," he says. "It allowed me to have more compassion towards the way that we were when we were carers, as opposed to the slightly critical way I felt about it when we were doing it. There's so many obstacles coming at you every day, I remember that from the time. It is weirdly like directing a film or something in that it's just constant obstacles and situations to resolve and new appointments coming every day. With my mother, it was very, very sudden. It was very fast, and it was about a year of things happening, things that were being lost all the time. And you always feel like you're slightly catching up with it and you're not quite doing a good enough job to give them the most that they can have. Then definitely afterwards, in writing this [film] and reliving it or going back on it, you start to see that, 'Oh yeah, you did the best that you could'."
That realisation has already connected with festivalgoers in Ireland, the UK, and the US - and now Four Mothers' wisdom is on offer to a wider audience.
"That's been one of the nice things," concludes Thornton. "I hadn't really thought about that that much, but just at festivals and stuff [people want to talk]. In LA last week, in Chicago a few weeks before - people do tend to come over at the end of the screening, at the end of the Q&A. You'll see a handful of people just hovering. You know that they're just dying to share their experience and chat about it. It's really nice, it's really unexpected. There's something about, I guess, being seen or something like that in the film that's really resonating with them."
Four Mothers is in cinemas now. Bring tissues and, if you can, your mam. You'll both be sitting in the dark - and there won't be a row.
