Before the film we dropped into Tailend restaurant and enjoyed a meal of sea bream and Thai seafood curry, washed down with a pint of Eden Mill Shipwreck IPA and a gin cocktail.

This basement restaurant is a welcome sanctuary on a dreich day like today. The food was great, especially the Thai seafood curry which came loaded with generous amounts of seafood. There wasn’t time for desserts because the showing of tonight’s film, ‘Mrs Lowry & Son’, was at 6.30pm. So we got the bill and headed across the street to nearby DCA.

‘I haven’t been cheerful since 1868.’

This is just one of several pithy, morose comments from the bedridden Mrs Lowry to her son which go towards making this film so riveting and enjoyable.

The whole film revolves around just the two main characters, as could be guessed from the title. There are very few supporting roles, but Vanessa Redgrave and Timothy Spall’s performances as the main characters are so engrossing that the film never feels like it needs a bigger cast. 

This film is beautifully lit, particularly the many extended scenes set in Mrs Lowry’s bedroom where she and her son share their lives.

One scene in particular is brilliantly framed, it could be a painting itself, a scene where the mother is lying on her side in bed, with her son standing between the bed and the window; a moment of stillness and peace for two people getting by in a tough, hard industrial environment.

The film’s palette consists of subdued browns and greys for the most part, vividly disrupted now and again by the bold red of the telephone box in which Lowry makes furtive calls to a dealer in London who has expressed interest in the possibility of exhibiting some of his paintings.

‘Mrs Lowry & Son’ is touching and drily funny in a downbeat understated way, an affectionate rendering of the relationship between mother and son that never sinks into mawkish sentimentality.

Mrs Lowry treats her son with what she probably considers to be tough love, constantly criticising his paintings and chiding him for wasting his time on what she dismissively terms his ‘hobby’. She makes no effort to hide how disappointed she is in her son, blaming him for doing nothing to provide a more financially comfortable life for the two of them.

For someone who had ambitions to be a concert pianist in her younger days, Mrs Lowry shows surprisingly little understanding for the son who is seeking to pursue an equally creative life but to date with little or no financial success to show for it.

Timothy Spall inhabits his role as Lowry with great conviction, portraying Lowry as a determined,  committed observer of the grim industrial life present all around him in his native Lancashire. His mother is filled with embarrassment and shame when the art critic in the local paper ridicules Lowry’s work; her son, though, is unconcerned by the art critic’s pronouncements.

The film is a great tribute to Lowry and his art.

After having seen the wonderful ‘Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life’ exhibition at Tate Britain in 2013, it was good to see some of Lowry’s art up on the big screen in this film and also in the excellent short documentary that was shown immediately after the film ended.

In the documentary, Timothy Spall visits The Lowry Centre in Salford where there is a permanent exhibition titled ‘LS Lowry – The Art & The Artist’. Here he talks with the museum curator about some of Lowry’s pictures, which they stand in front of and dissect.

I’m glad I decided to stick around after the main film ended to watch this short documentary, as Timothy Spall’s comments on the paintings were very interesting and insightful. Spall describes how he immersed himself in Lowry’s art as he was preparing for the role in the film. During the shooting of the film he would paint his own pictures based on Lowry’s originals, and this gave him deeper understanding and motivation to play the role of Lowry.

When we emerged from the DCA at the end of ‘Mrs Lowry & Son’, it was a very still, mild September evening, perfect for the walk home along Perth Road.

Related Post: ‘Prophecy’, Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA)

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