All about passion and tears
by Sarah Hughes | March 27, 2019 | The Guardian
When Helen McCrory launched into a monologue about a dead seal I nearly lost hope, but the family saga has won me over with its pure, jaw-dropping emotion
Warning: this piece contains spoilers for MotherFatherSon
Before MotherFatherSon began I thought I had some idea what to expect. It was written by Tom Rob Smith, creator of London Spy and The Assassination of Gianni Versace. It starred Richard Gere as a millionaire media mogul, Helen McCrory as his estranged wife and Billy Howle as their troubled, cocaine-addled son.
Throw into the mix Sarah Lancashire and Danny Sapani as rival politicians with an election coming up and Sinead Cusack and Paul Ready as crusading journalists investigating their shady boss and you’ve got all the elements for a state of the nation stew, right?
Completely and utterly wrong. MotherFatherSon may wear the trappings of a state of the nation drama, and Smith is paying lip service to that genre’s conventions, but his series is considerably more unusual.
It’s been clear from the opening episode, when Howle somehow carried off one of the most uncomfortable sex scenes ever aired, that Smith wanted us to be aware we were watching An Important Drama. With Important Things To Say. About Men. And Masculinity. And Power.
By the second episode, when McCrory’s Kathryn delivered a lengthy monologue about a dying seal lying on a beach, which was also an extended metaphor for lost childhood, I almost gave up. That I didn’t was testimony first to McCrory’s skill and second to something less instantly clear: the realisation that this wasn’t so much drama as melodrama, a series where everything happens at a higher pitch, with much emoting, because big things are at stake.
Once you start to see MotherFatherSon as the sort of thing the almighty forefathers of melodrama Douglas Sirk, Irving Rapper or Vincente Minnelli might have created, everything falls into place. For they are all about passion and tears, about struggles and strong feelings and the sort of clashes where everyone collectively loses their minds.
Think of Bette Davies in Now, Voyager, struggling to be free of her tyrannical mother, or Rock Hudson in All That Heaven Allows dealing with love and a life-threatening accident. Lauren Bacall holding together the tatters of her marriage in Written on the Wind, Kirk Douglas as a Hollywood tycoon who has fallen from grace in The Bad and the Beautiful or Joan Crawford bearing the weight of the world in Autumn Leaves.
MotherFatherSon shares something of those films’ heightened reality, their willingness to pile disaster upon disaster – and something too of the lush madness of Tennessee Williams at his most unrestrained. It’s a series in which you truly think anything might happen and where the dialogue isn’t so much stylised as ready to fall, like the most over-ripe fruit.
Not convinced? Look at Howle’s arc thus far. His Caden spent the first episode snorting cocaine, paying for loveless sex and alienating all around him before having a stroke. Since then he has struggled with his recovery, attempting to push his family away while forming a tentative bond with a fellow patient named Orla. She suggests that rather than start a relationship they would be better off killing themselves in a Mayerling-style pact, a suggestion Caden considered before deciding that for the first time he might actually be capable of love. Those burgeoning feelings have the knock-on effect of making him feel bad about his past, and this desire to atone coupled with the stroke lowering his inhibitions have left him considering revealing the dark truth about his father.
Max (Gere), meanwhile, is the sort of cold, complicated patriarch every good melodrama must have. Is he the show’s villain? The series so far has kept us guessing, hinting that he’s a pragmatist at heart. Yet that very pragmatism makes it easy for him to swipe those who no longer fulfil their roles in his world from the board. “I finally see you as you really are,” he tells Caden at one point, a sentence that might sound loving coming from another parent but here sends a chill to the heart.
Then there’s Kathryn. As anyone who saw her performance in the 2016 revival of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, or has watched her steal the show as Aunt Pol in Peaky Blinders, can confirm, McCrory is made for melodrama. She has the rare ability to give the most heightened of speeches a ring of truth; even if you don’t believe in everything happening around her, you always believe in her.
This talent has been particularly important in MotherFatherSon, where Kathryn is pretty much a modern-day Mildred Pierce facing each new trial with grace and a determination to somehow get through. There are hints too of Far From Heaven, Todd Haynes’ homage to Sirk, in the privileged Kathryn’s relationship with the homeless Scott, a relationship which she will surely have to sacrifice if she is to fully win back her son.
As the above might suggest, this is not a show for everyone. The dialogue can jar. The political and journalism subplots feel bolted on. And there’s always the fear that the whole thing will trip from melodrama into farce (indeed the uncharitable might say it already has). But I feel that MotherFatherSon is walking the fine line between the two with some flair and, after watching tonight’s impassioned three-hander between Gere, McCrory and Howle in which Max and Kathryn do battle for Caden’s soul, I’m hoping for the sort of three-handkerchief finale in which every heartstring is shamelessly pulled.
MotherFatherSon continues on BBC Two tonight at 9pm