The Mother, nominee and winner of several awards, including from the London Film Critics' Circle, is essentially a British version of About Schmidt, with a woman cast in the lead. Unfortunately, there's no Jack Nicholson in sight to help hoist the movie up, though Anne Reid as May does do an outstanding job.
May is an elderly woman, newly widowed after her husband has a heart attack while they are visiting their children in London. Unable to live in her now-empty house by herself and become an idle, lonely woman like her neighbors, she has her son Bobby (Steven Mackintosh) take her back to his home in London.
As Bobby and his wife argue over their faltering new business, May wanders off, soon getting herself lost, physically and symbolicly, in town. Somehow, she finds her way to the home of her daughter, Paula (Cathryn Bradshaw). And that's where the tale, as they say, takes a twist.
Paula is having an affair with the married Darren (Daniel Craig), the handyman employed by Bobby to build a conservatory onto their home. May's discovery of the affair, and her approaching Paula about it, leads to May confronting Darren. As May begins to emerge as her own person from her husband's shadow, she begins a torrid affair with the roguish Darren, who on top of being a handyman along the lines of Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper of Lady Chatterley's Lover, is also creative, sensitive and alleged dedicated father to an autistic son (though there is never any indication of this devotion). In the meantime, Paula has been undergoing sessions with a therapist, the results being that she now blames her mother for every shortcoming and unhappiness in her life.
Eventually, Paula discovers her mother's cross-generational affair and what little familial stability there is shatters as easily as the conservatory's glass panes do when Darren erupts in drunken rage.
More than being about breaking societal taboos of intergenerational orgasms, Roger Mitchell's film is really about the selfish wants and desires that keep our lives locked in tight orbits. Darren is greedy for May's life insurance payout; Paula's world is all about her; May wants the dream lover she never knew in her youth; and Bobby wants a lifestyle he can't afford.
In the end, everyone is bruised and battered, full of broken dreams.