Mrs Lowry & Son

Famous for his paintings of industrial scenes in Salford, the “matchstalk men and matchstalk cats and dogs” of the 1978 pop hit, Laurence Stephen Lowry is the subject of an interesting biopic showing in cinemas now.

With a cast of just two characters (the painter and his elderly widowed mother) and the entire ‘action’ of the film taking place within the confines of his mother’s bedroom, the overwhelming atmosphere is one of claustrophobia. “Laurie” dances attendance on his parent in the hope of a word of encouragement that never comes. Terminally disillusioned, Mrs Lowry sees herself as a woman cheated of a better life by her marriage to an ordinary working man whom she blames entirely for putting paid to her aspirations to the “middle class” on which she had clearly set her sights from an early age (we are reminded at key points in the narrative that a sparkling career as a concert pianist had at one time been hers for the taking).  Never reconciled to having to move from suburban Victoria Park to a two-up-two-down in industrial Pendlebury, her bitterness has become more entrenched over the years, her obsession with class ever-present, her son a constant source of disappointment. “Why is it when I look at you I always want to close my eyes?” she tells him.

For Lowry, however, the house, within spitting distance of the local mill, is perfectly placed to provide him with the essential material for his paintings. Working by day as a rent collector, as his father had before him, “Laurie’s” evenings are taken up primarily with ministering to his mother’s needs – an endless round of pillow-plumping, food preparation, meals taken formally à deux and polite conversation. Dutiful, uncomplaining, and self-effacing to a fault, his duties as his mother’s sole carer mean, however, that only the bare minimum of time is left over to spend on his true love, painting. He retreats to his dark attic studio to fulfil his true calling, or to ‘do his hobby’ as his mother insists on calling it. “I am a man who paints, nothing more, nothing less” Lowry intones more than once.

While grudgingly conceding a liking for her son’s ‘Sailing Boats’ (the only painting of his on which she apparently ever deigned to make positive comment), she continually ridicules and derides her son’s ‘mission’ (as he describes it) to try to capture in paint the day-to-day reality of life in a northern mill town – the chimneys, barrack-like factory buildings and hollow-eyed workers. During one of the pair’s more violent fallings-out, Mrs Lowry declares loftily, lips fully pursed: “Where is the beauty?”  The brutal pleasure she takes in reading aloud the negative reviews of her son’s work leaves a sour taste.

Vanessa Redgrave has been much lauded for her portrayal of Mrs Lowry, perfectly capturing as she does the acerbic, overbearing ‘parent from hell’. But for me it is Timothy Spall who gives the standout performance here, perfectly capturing the lonely man, unloved and unappreciated during his lifetime – most notably by the one person who could/should have encouraged him to follow his artistic muse instead of undermining his efforts at every opportunity.

So what do we learn about Lowry that we didn’t know before? Not much – his ‘strange’ character is already well-documented. But as a study of thwarted ambition and the effect this can have on a man who spends his entire life desperately seeking approval but receiving none, the film succeeds very well. Although occasionally tending towards the mawkish and with annoyingly intrusive ‘background’ music, Mrs Lowry & Son is a sensitively acted biography of one of this country’s most-recognised, if not most-loved, artists. And - something he never achieved in real life – L.S. Lowry now has the last word. After years out in the cold, his paintings now sell for millions of pounds and the Lowry Centre in Salford, dedicated to the arts generally and Lowry’s art in particular, attracts large numbers of visitors every year from all over the world. Not bad for a ‘hobby’ painter.