The House That Will Not Stand, 26.11.14

Queen Bee of New Orleans:
Martina Laird's Beartrice massaged
by her slave Makeda (Tanya Moodie)

Marcus Gardley’s “The House That Will Not Stand”, a compulsively watchable new African-American play currently playing at Indhu Rubasingham’s Tricycle in its European première, was a greedy child’s pick-a-mix in the sweet-store of literary tropes.

You want three young sisters pining for male suitors à la Chekhov and Cinders desperate to reach the ball?  Check.  You want an indomitable materfamilias ruling her family with a rod of iron à la Bernarda Alba?  Check.  You want a supposedly unhinged female relative locked up in the attic à la Miss Havisham?  Check.  You want a subordinate out-smarting their stubborn employer à la Goldoni?  Check.  A narrative of female emancipation like Celie’s in ‘The Color Purple”?  Check.  A steamy, sultry New Orleans à la “Streetcar”?  Check.  Drums providing distant echoes of Mother Africa like O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones”?  Check.  A ghost scene and domestic hocus-pocus fresh out of Edgar Allan Poe?  Check.  A bitch-fest between two pugnacious matrons Capote would have killed to write?  Check.

Martina Laird's Beartrice takes her sister
Marie (Claire Perkins) in hand

Add-in some cutesy Gallicisms (it was the French Quarter after all), a smattering of mournful Latin chanting (Lorca again), some sparkling patois (novel Creole meanings for “tea” and “pie”), and an inexhaustible fund of hot-zinger one-liners.  Stir.  Serve hot, courtesy of a female cast on tip-top-form.  Await applause, standing ovations (spontaneous on the night Motley was there) and, with luck, a generous dollop of gongs to follow.

 

The Three Sisters of Faubourg Treme:
devout Maude Lynn (Danusia Samal),
flighty Agnes (Ayesha Antoine) &
dreamy Odette (Ronke Adelkoluejo)

I make light of Gardley’s achievements. His new play broke fresh ground, uncovering a forgotten corner of U.S. history.  The setting was New Orleans 1836, after the Louisiana Purchase (1803), but before the full enforcement of binary U.S. race laws.  French and Spanish custom and colonial law had recognised a mestizo caste and enabled a few black women to own property (including their own slaves) by virtue of being white men’s concubines (“placées”).  But under U.S. governance the racial thumbscrews were tightening.  So when wealthy placée Beartrice’s common-law white husband dies mysteriously, there’s no time to be lost to ensure she keeps a roof over her head and provides for her variously-hued daughters, wayward sister and slave.

Playwright Marcus Gardley (b1978)

If gathering racial storm-clouds make Gardley’s play sound rather heavy (and the ending, while agonisingly well-done by Martina Laird, was a tad histrionic), what really marked Gardley’s play out was its verbal inventiveness, comic verve and the deftly-judged interplay between the female characters. 

 

Fresh from her success in "Intimate Apparel" in the summer, Tanya Moodie’s level-headed and regal slave Makeda demonstrated movingly that legal niceties are nothing set against emotional strength. But the most unforgettable scenes for this writer were the verbal duels between Martina Laird’s steely Beartrice and her sworn enemy, the well-upholstered La Veuve, played with a glint by Michele Austin:

La Veuve (Michelle Austin, to L) faces off against
Beartrice (Martina Laird, to R), flanked by
Beartrice's three daughters

“Sweet Jesus, when I heard you was poorer than Joe’s turkey, I shed a whole tear, I did.  That's why I’m really here in fact.  I ran over to share it with you.  See.  It’s still in my eye.  I’m saving it for you so you can wash the floors with it before I move in.“  (La Veuve)

“The only movin' you doin' is movin' them two antsy legs and that wide mouth off my porch.  I’m keeping my house.  ....  It’s sad that you hate me so much .... It makes me want to shed a whole tear for you.  And I would if I thought it would wash away your hatefulness.  But hate is your true love.  And one day it will eat you:  flesh, bone and sinew, till all that is left is your fluttering tongue:  that overworked red cut of meat that for all its flapping ain’t never did nobody no earthly good” (Beartrice)

 

Anyone who wants to catch this awesome show had better hurry:  it finishes Saturday November 29th.

 

Assassins, 25.11.14

It’s a strangely consistent phenomenon but London Sondheim productions have the knack of out-classing the original New York ones (judging those from their cast recordings).

The Menier did it before with landmark productions of “Sunday in the Park” (2005/6) and “A Little Night Music” (2008/9).  Jamie Lloyd's stupendous production of “Assassins” was no exception. Quite simply it never put a foot wrong, speeding by in 105 minutes, no mean feat for a show whose ‘bitter-and-twisted’ complexity has a reputation for being difficult to bring off. And Motley was fortunate enough to have front-row preview-week seats only inches away from the performers.

 

Director Jamie Lloyd

Sondheim’s tartly pungent 1991 musical imagines a fraternity of U.S. presidential assassins encouraging each other in their serial attempts to change history at the point of a gun (“All you have to do / Is move your little finger”).  Nine assassins, one composite blood-spattered President (hunky Simon Lipkin) and a chorus of five ordinary Joes were complemented musically by an octet directed on piano by Alan Williams.  The even-cleverer-than-usual libretto paid meta-theatrical hommage to that other famous stage failure Willy Loman (“Attention must be paid!”). 

Aaron Tveit as Lincoln's
assassin John Wilkes Booth

Soutra Gilmour’s fairground set, overlaced with a cobweb of multi-coloured light-bulbs, brought out the ludic elements in the piece, while her period costumes anchored each assassin to their specific historical context.  Neon bulbs lit up the words “Hit” and “Miss” either side of the stage after each assassination attempt, proceeding non-chronologically from John Wilkes Booth (silky-voiced Broadway import Aaron Tveit) to Lee Harvey Oswald. Successful assassins were rewarded with a shower of scarlet confetti before expiring on stage in their ensuing executions. 

Mike McShane (almost unrecognisable without beard or half his former bulk) was particularly unnerving as Nixon’s failed assassin, Samuel Byck, the epitomy of brooding Seventies suburban menace in Santa costume and dodgem-car, pouring bile into a tape recorder (appropriately enough) for onward transmission to his (imaginary) “friend” Lenny Bernstein. 

Catherine Tate taking pot-shots at
Colonel Sanders in readiness for her character's
failed attempt on the life of Gerald Ford

Catherine Tate provided more evidence of her impeccable comic timing and talent for accents playing failed Ford assassin, cooky West Virginian Sara Jane Moore.  Lithe and hirsute Stewart Clarke (a National Youth Music Theatre newcomer) did a mean accent as Zangara, FDR’s failed Italian assassin, expectorating vigorously over the stage in mid-electrocution.  Ex-“History Boy” Jamie Parker doubled up as a bluegrass banjo-playing Balladeer, initially a voice of popular reason who transmogrifies sinisterly for the finale into Lee Harvey Oswald (presented here as a kind of ‘assassin’s assassin’). 

Jamie Parker (Balladeer/Lee Harvey Oswald) &
Simon Lipkin (Presidential composite)

A succession of toe-tappingly good musical numbers lifted a show always at risk of being ‘brought down’ by its cast of losers, revealing properly to Motley for the first time the quality of Sondheim’s score. From Leon Czolgosz’s “Gun Song” (pitch-perfect Polish accent from David Roberts) to Charles Guiteau’s “I am going to the Lordie” (an alarmingly manic Andy Nyman) to John Hinckley’s “Unworthy of your love” (Harry Morrison and Carly Bawden duetting in Seventies polyester) the singing was uniformly great. 

The show bowed out with the full troop of assassins singing the deliciously dark choral number “Everybody’s got the right to be happy ..  everybody’s got the right to their dreams”.  It may seem odd given the subject matter but you left the intimate Menier auditorium on a real high, conscious of having seen something special. Motley's nomination for best London show of 2014.
 

[Preview week so no shots yet of the cast in character]

Mr Turner, 2.11.14



Timothy Spall's Turner at the Royal Academy

Motley hasn’t always been Mike Leigh’s greatest fan, but “Mr Turner”, his biopic of England’s greatest artist, is nothing short of a masterpiece, a strong contender for film-of-the-year. 

Leigh (71) focused on Turner’s last years before his death at 76 in 1851, a time before the railways when the quickest way from London to Margate was by sea-steamer.  Seldom have I seen a historical period brought so convincingly to life:  you could almost smell the horse-shit in the streets.



Father & Son (Paul Jesson & Timothy Spall)

Leigh’s Turner (played with gusto by Timothy Spall), the original ‘grumpy old man’, is a bluff self-made rough diamond of few words but many growls, who lives in bachelor-bliss with his beloved ‘Dada’ (Paul Jesson) and their faithful housemaid Dorothy (Hannah Danby) in a suitably filthy town-house.  He’s sired two children, for whom he takes no responsibility, and their shrewish mother comes round occasionally to berate him.  His life consists of jockeying for position with fellow hacks at the Royal Academy, buttering up aristocratic patrons, and purposeful striding into the hills to scout for new subjects to paint. 

Curmudgeons never smile:  Spall's Turner

The misused servant, her face ever more crustular as the years pass, provides an outlet for short passionless couplings until, on one of his many pseudonymous scouting expeditions, Turner meets Margate landlady Mrs Booth (the twinkly-eyed Marion Bailey).  Her ex-naval husband (Karl Johnson), tormented by his own experiences as a slaver, conveniently goes the way of all flesh, leaving Turner free to woo her, with unapologetic directness.  The faithful servant meanwhile, whose love for him is never voiced, is abandoned to an ever-dustier townhouse. 

Light relief came from two memorable cameos.  “Was ist das?” whispers the young Queen Victoria in horror to Prince Albert at Turner’s proto-impressionist daubings at the Academy.  Meanwhile Joshua McGuire’s Ruskin, a Harold Acton-style aesthete avant la lettre, pontificated on art in his stately home with magnificent vacuity (in a role interpreted by some as Leigh’s revenge on critics in general). 

This appropriately visual film, rather like Jarman’s ‘Caravaggio’, conjured up a world of intense physicality, whether in the mounds of freshly ground powdered paint, the cat mess on the painter’s overcoat or the sea-swell on Turner’s bewhiskered face as he was lashed to a mast to experience the full force of a marine storm for himself.  Early Victorian England was depicted as wholly lacking in sentimentality, a place of male inarticulacy and female victimhood, where you either sank or swam. 

When Turner’s end came, ship-wrecked red-faced on Mrs Booth’s bed like the hulk of a sea-lion, we heard Spall grunt his famous last words “The sun is a God!” before the camera cut away to the two women in his life, one smiling, the other disconsolate.  Truly all human life was there.
 


Marion Bailey's Mrs Booth shares a lighter moment
with Timothy Spall's Turner

No such levity for Hannah Danby's misused servant

Altman, 16.10.14

Ron Mann’s fond and classy tribute to Hollywood’s rebel-director Robert Altman (1925-2006), showing at the BFI in the London Film Festival, exceeded all expectations.  Made with the support of Altman’s widow Kathryn (his third and longest-lasting wife), it convincingly located him in time and place. 

Originally a hack TV director from Kansas, Altman cut his teeth on advertising promos and series like “Bonanza” in the Sixties. After a long apprenticeship, he got his big break with the original movie version of “M*A*S*H” in 1970 which, though set in the Korean War, was an ironic commentary on the war in Vietnam.  (The studio tried and failed to get him to excise a particularly gorey scene in an operating theatre.) 

Tim Robbins' callow producer receives yet
another death threat in 1992's "The Player"

A virulently anti-Nixon child of the late Sixties (he tore up a signed bio the ex-President later sent him in jest), Altman managed to get himself fired by almost every major Hollywood Studio.  His commitment to film as artistry and his determination to show gritty reality and l'Amerique profonde in the flesh made him the darling of the European festival set, which rewarded him with two BAFTAs (for “The Player” and “Gosford Park”), two Palmes d’Ors (for “MASH” and “The Player) and two Golden Bears.  In contrast Hollywood managed only a belated and merely honorary Oscar. 

Donald Sutherland, Sally Kellerman and Elliott Gould on manoeuvres
in Altman's 1970 breakthrough movie "MASH" 

The early-to-mid-Seventies (“Nashville”, “The Long Goodbye”, “McCabe and Mrs Miller” – alas none of which Motley has actually seen) were his signature period, but he had a late flowering with masterpieces like “The Player” (a 1992 satire on Hollywood, which he described as being “nothing like as bad as reality”, and which included the longest (8 minute +) opening tracking shot in film history), “Short Cuts” (which completely bowled Motley over in 1994), "Kansas City" (a moody 1996 film about jazz's early days), “Gosford Park” (a fresh take on the English country house murder mystery) and “The Prairie Home Companion” (his last film, a collaboration with Garrison Keillor, filled with intimations of mortality, in which Streep and Tomlin excelled). 

The doc didn’t shy away from the fact that Altman’s career included a long fallow period in the Eighties (when he was completely out-of-tune with the zeitgeist) and a fair few turkeys (such as “Popeye” – Robin Williams’ debut feature from 1980, "Pret-a-Porter", a 1994 take on the fashion industry, and “Cookie’s Fortune” – a 1999 Southern yarn with Glenn Close).
 

Lily Tomlin and Tom Waits live it large on the San Andreas Fault
waiting for 'the big one' in Altman's seminal 1994 "Short Cuts",
an adaptation of multiple Raymond Carver short stories

Mann's film pinpointed what was most distinctive about Altman's work (stylised satirical naturalism, overlapping dialogue, blurred sound, masterly choice of music, a willingness to tell the truth about the kind of issues Hollywood normally avoids, a fondness for large baggy ensemble pieces, and recurring actors like Lily Tomlin, Elliott Gould and Shelley Duvall).  It benefitted from the inclusion of family videos which really gave a sense of the man's lumbering paternal good-nature, while gently acknowledging he may have put more effort into film-making than raising his six children. 



Altman and wife Kathryn in the director's last years

A series of Hollywood “A-listers”, filmed in black-and-white close-up profile, offered multiple definitions of what “Altmanesque” meant to them:  "makin' your own rules", "kicking Hollywood's ass", "creating a family" and "expect the unexpected" were some of the snappier offerings from the likes of PT Anderson, Julianne Moore, Lily Tomlin, Bruce Willis and the late Robin Williams.  Altman himself believed it was 'all about the actors'.
 
Altman lived long and drank hard, throwing party after party. After several brushes with near-penury, he ended up in an enormous beach-side condo in Malibu, and survived a heart transplant eleven years.  Mann's film succeeded in placing Altman squarely in that precious counter-cultural generation of Americans which wasn’t prepared to play the now ubiquitous corporate game.  “No hippies were harmed in the making of this film” said the closing credit!

James I (The Key Will Keep The Lock), 8.10.14

The Scots Trilogy (James I, II & III),
currently playing at London's National Theatre

Intriguingly, Hilary Mantel (an unmistakably substantial presence) was in the audience for this NT matinée of the first of Rona Munro’s much-lauded National Theatre of Scotland trilogy on Scots history.  Motley wondered quite what the skilfully nuanced biographer of Thomas Cromwell made of this resolutely demotic foray into the tenebrous gloom and chest-hair of fifteenth century Stirling, a place where even the apples have to be imported from England. 

James McArdle's James I takes on
his uncle Murdac (Gordon Kennedy)

The historical James I (more a “King of Scots” than a “King of Scotland” in Munro’s Nationalist formulation) had come to the throne at the age of twelve in 1406 only to spend eighteen years as a hostage at the English court.  The play covered the 1420-25 period when Henry V of England (Jamie Sives), having publicly humiliated James but realising his own days were numbered, allowed him to return to claim his birthright from the regent, his uncle Murdac Stewart.  Munro’s piece dramatised the thirty year old king’s return, marriage, assumption of powers and humbling of his cousins, the Albany Stewarts.  (For simplicity’s sake, it left out the story of his eventual murder thirteen years later at the hands of yet another of the unruly Stewarts.) 

James McArdle's James I and his bête noire
Blythe Duff's Lady Isabella

With more than a passing nod to Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, but alas with little of the Bard’s lexical sophistication, we witnessed the initially bookish and romantic James (commandingly played by James McArdle) cast aside sensitivity and scruple to assure the safety of his dynasty and that of his new English queen (the endearingly girlish Stephanie Hyam).  Confronted by the greed of the Albany Stewarts (led by Blythe Duff's redoubtable ‘Lady Isabella’, who was clearly channelling Lady Macbeth), the message was that James had no alternative but to “man up”, roger his queen in front of half the Scots nobility and vigorously knock heads together (or off).  This was a bracingly retro message for a female playwright. 

'Uneasy lies the head that wears
the crown' (James McArdle's James I)

Munro had fun depicting the distinctly rambunctious Scottish court, all rough-and-ready snouts to the trough.  Fifteenth-century politics was depicted as being about little more than clashes of uncontrolled appetite between boorish nobles entirely uncivilised by law or culture.  (Lady Isabella, required to vacate the palace upon the king’s return, was only just prevented from carrying off the royal plate, while her unruly sons polished off most of what lunch was available.) 

Jon Bausor’s suitably threadbare two-level set (with a a raised throne above a giant sword, to remind us of the source of all power in this period) was well-done, as were the well-choreographed battle scenes and Paul Leonard-Morgan’s muscular music.  To my mind, though, Munro rather overdid the barely-disguised Nationalist sub-text about the financially-predatory English or the ‘take-me-as-ye-find-me’ Scots being immune to English social deference.

Playwright Rona Munro

Although the relatively obscure historical subject matter was calculated to appeal to Motley, if you’re going to take a period which the Bard so made his own, you really need to clothe your text in something more nourishing than expletives.  While Munro’s timing can’t, in the light of the referendum, be faulted, the exposure to Part One didn’t leave Motley's pulse racing to see Parts Two or Three. 

Pride, 23.9.14

George Mackay's Bromley discovers his inner activist

A bevy of luvvies (Imelda Staunton, Bill Nighy, Dominic West, Andrew Scott, Paddy Considine) starred in this warm crowd-pleaser about a small group of gay activists who fund-raised for the miners during the 1984/5 strike, despite themselves being under attack from homophobes, viruses and the tabloids. 

Heavily-inspired by “Made in Dagenham”, an earlier Brit-flick about marginalised people coming of age during a strike, Matthew Warchus’s feel-good ensemble flick transmuted challenging story-lines into something more uplifting, while occasionally teetering on the verge of corniness.  Much of the story-line was apparently based on fact:  a South Wales colliery band did indeed repay the gay activists' support by leading the 1985 London “Pride” march and NUM block-votes subsequently helped shift Labour party policy on the age of consent. 

Imelda Staunton hits the dance-floor at the Miners' Welfare Club

In the tradition of miners' strike films ("Billy Elliott", "The Full Monty"), Stephen Beresford's script focused squarely on the links between the personal and the political.  Framed as a coming-out tale for 20yo “Bromley” (a gawky catering student well under-played by George Mackay), the film was saturated in Eighties cultural signifiers (à la “Peter’s Friends”, “Starter for Ten”) and looked back nostalgically to the days when playing Bronski Beat, Frankie and Billy Bragg was the standard form of protest. 

A morality tale about the personal confidence to be gained from standing up and reaching across social borders, the film had fun with the classic British trope of introducing urbanites to a traditional provincial setting (cf “Withnail and I”).  Most of the best lines went to the miners' wives, very much the glue holding the pit-village together.  A bulked-up Staunton rather stole the show as a redoubtable Welsh battle-axe you probably wouldn't want to bump into on an unlit street at night. 
 

"LGSM:  Lesbians & Gays Support the Miners"

Ben Schnetzer was the quiffed and gobby activist who led a motley band of naifs to raise funds for a Welsh pit village 'so small there were no vowels in its name' (his character apparently based on real-life activist Mark Watson, who fell victim to AIDS only two years after the strike).  Dominic West had fun playing against standard macho type as a flamboyant Seventies ‘dancing queen’, while Andrew Scott ("Sherlock's" Moriarty) had to be more buttoned-up as West's gay-bashed Welsh lover.  The film played amusingly too with the uneasy gay/lesbian dialectic. 

For those of us who remember these events first-hand, it was striking what a different world 1984 was compared to today, similarly oppressive governments aside.  Motley found himself far more drawn to it as a wised-up forty-something than he probably would have done as a shy provincial teenager at the time.  Better late than never!

My Night With Reg, 28.8.14

Robert Hastie's well-performed twentieth anniversary Donmar production of Kevin Elyot's 1994 landmark gay comedy set in 1985, a 1950s parlour drama with added profanity, was played through without intervals.  The play had created a stir back in 1994 as the first "out" gay drama to hit the West End.  Is it picky to think it might have worked better if it had been a little more "in"?  Comic toasts ("Gross indecency!") exemplified a tendency to banality, while the play helped initiate the tendency of every subsequent 'gay play' to throw in some arbitrary full-frontal nudity to pull in the punters. 


Lewis Reeves' butt enlivened an otherwise
less than enthralling trip down memory lane

Elyot (who died in June, just before this production opened) dallied in the over-familiar territory of the English inability to communicate or engage emotionally.

Most of the characters, with the exception of the youngster, were stereotypes, exiled from youthful dreams of David Bowie by fear of imminent lonely middle-age, or worse.
 

Jonathon Broadbent's apron-clad Guy

Jonathon Broadbent was heavily-bespectacled and repressed Guy, the recipient of multiple well-intentioned cookbooks for one, ever the hostess and never the bride.  Floppy-haired Geoffrey Streatfeild was Daniel, Reg’s dandyish widow, forever running off to hop on planes to the other side of the world.  Old-Etonian Julian Ovenden (better-known from “Downton Abbey” and the son of HMQ’s former chaplain, no less) was public-school drifter John, one of Reg’s many bits-on-the-side, and the object of Guy’s excruciatingly undeclared affections. 
 
Relief from the tiresome Oxbridge-ness of these three came from Matt Bardock as Benny, a priapically blunt Cockney bus driver, and from Richard Cant's Bernie, a classic bore who banged-on about conservatories with an impressively nasal whine.  Twinkly-blue-eyed twenty-five-year-old blond Lewis Reeves was ingénu Brummie painter Eric, the least damaged and most appealing character (as well as the least clothed). 
 

Geoffrey Streatfield's flighty Daniel and
Julian Ovenden's vulnerable John

The central conceit was, of course, that the eponymously absent Reg had slept with them all (bar Eric) and had just been carried off by AIDS.  The unexpected plot twist was that it was the gentlest and least promiscuous character (given to donning Marigolds before any intimate encounter) who was unexpectedly next in line for the Grim Reaper.
 

Lewis Reeves as Eric, the one point of optimism
in a play misleadingly labelled a "comedy" 

Motley's feelings about the play were strangely unchanged from twenty years ago.  It was quite hard to stomach the depressing mixture of unfulfilled men, mundane text (characters constantly being offered refills) and low comedy ("Nuts anyone?", asked the gauchely 'Carry-On' host at his breathtakingly dull soirée), even without the looming threat from an unnamed killer virus.  It was also too well-manneredly English, summoning up little of the rage of Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart", another early AIDS drama.
 
Elyot’s rancid view of gay men was unsentimental and reductive in more or less equal measure (though not entirely unfair, judging by post-production chat-room comments on the size of Mr Reeves’ equipment).  Improved social and medical conditions have fortunately allowed most gay men to move on from those terrible mid-Thatcher years – and not before time.  

Boyhood, 20.8.14

Mason Jnr (the 6 year old Ellar Coltrane) as we first saw him

Richard Linklater’s Berlin Silver Bear winner was a Bildungsroman examining how “time’s winged-chariot” deals with both children and parents.

Media coverage rightly focused on the extraordinary feat of filming the same fictional family, in cinema verité style, over twelve years. 

We watched Patricia Arquette (Mom) and Ethan Hawke (Dad - Mason Snr), unmarried American parents of modest means, split, move, marry, divorce, remarry and divorce again, while bringing up two children through this maelstrom of changing relationships.  Arquette was particularly impressive at conveying the low-key decency of a Mom who’s serially disappointed by men (“I thought there would be more”, she concludes - about life rather than men).
 

Mason Jnr's Mom (Patricia Arquette), who matures 
as much as either of her children

The eponymous boy Mason Jnr (Ellar Coltrane) went from six to eighteen before our eyes, in tandem with his slightly older sister Sam (played by Linklater’s own daughter Lorelei). 

Yet while we saw Mason Jnr grow up, for him, as for many teenagers, life was always elusively in the present tense (“It’s like it’s always right now”). 

Linklater’s typically Texan-set film was a languorous moody affair, more interested in the mundane realities of relationships and family life than broader social issues.  There were a few topical references to Iraq and the 2008 Obama campaign (Dad swiped some McCain billboards).  Many of the rites of passage were specifically American: baseball and bowling with Dad and a, to European eyes, creepy vignette where Mason Jnr was given a shotgun for his fifteenth birthday by doting bible-bashing hick step-grandparents.  A few more troubling episodes apart (for instance when Mom was beaten up by her alcoholic second partner), the focus of the movie was on showing children's personalities developing - not least in opposition to adults’ frequently cack-handed attempts to guide them.

Finally accepting responsibility:  Dad (Ethan Hawke)
takes his son away for one of many single-parent weekends

Linklater ‘s trademark mood of slightly bemused directionlessness, memorably essayed in “Dazed and Confused” as long ago as 1993, was repeated here at deliberate length.  The pace of the 2 ¾ hour screen time occasionally flagged but the film worked far better than Terrence Mallick’s “Tree of Life”, which tried to cover similar territory more impressionistically.

The universality of the theme, despite the particularities of the American setting, virtually guaranteed a positive audience response, helped by Linklater’s refusal to sensationalise.  Motley had two main cavils. Firstly, with the exception of one Hispanic, there was no attempt to represent America as the melting-pot that it is, with African-Americans in particular conspicuously absent.  Secondly, as many others have commented, flick was mis-titled and should have been called “Family” or “Motherhood”, since it was as much about Mom, Dad and the Sister as about the Boy. 

"The Three Ages of Boy":
Mason Jnr at 6, 14 and 18

That said, compared to the pap that Hollywood generally churns out, kudos is due to the “auteur of Austin” for a sensitive, acute and authentic portrayal, from admirably multiple perspectives, of the transfer of the baton between the generations.