Another Mother's Son review: Jenny Seagrove's pluck isn't enough to win this war
Dir: Christopher Menaul. Cast: Jenny Seagrove, John Hannah, Ronan Keating, Julian Kostov, Peter Wight. 12A cert, 103 mins
Jenny Seagrove vs the Nazis? It’s hardly a fair fight. Another Mother’s Son shows chipper favouritism towards its leading lady, with all her Greer-Garson-in-Mrs-Miniver practicality and pluck, as befits a home-front WWII drama produced by her husband, Bill Kenwright. Not that anyone’s moved to back the other team, but the cardboard characterisation of her adversaries makes it strangely tempting to cry foul.
Easily the film’s most entertaining moment arrives midway. The setting is Nazi-occupied Jersey in 1942-3, and here’s Seagrove as Louisa Gould, a real-life war widow harbouring an escaped Russian PoW named Feodor (though she calls him Bill) in her modest cottage.
At a merry gathering on Christmas Eve, Bill (Julian Kostov) makes the mistake of serenading all their friendly neighbours in Russian. Suddenly – knock, knock! – suspicious Nazis are at their door. Bill flees out back to the chicken coop, and for anxious moments it looks like curtains.
But wait! Louisa’s brother, though we don’t yet know it, is a teacher who has managed to absorb a smattering of Russian. He’s able to pipe up and pass himself off as the one who was singing, strolling to the door and saving the day. To maximise the miracle, this character is played by none other than Ronan Keating, who may not have enjoyed so life-or-death a function since co-writing the lyrics to Boyzone’s Picture of You.
The other Jersey locals have also got Bill’s back, except for a couple of malign busybodies who keep sending anonymous notes to Jerry and spoiling everyone’s fun. You can tell when something terrible is about to be witnessed or announced, because it’s prefaced every damn time by someone obliviously singing: no sooner has Seagrove piped up with a coy ditty about limpet-picking, than she’s clawing open a Red Cross telegram to learn one of her sons has died.
Jenny Lecoat’s script admits to being a fictionalised version of Louisa Gould’s heroic martyrdom, but it’s one with an unfortunate air of unreality – if they’d all just refrained from crooning so persistently, you start to wonder if the war’s worst horrors might have landed elsewhere.
Beyond a presiding innocuousness, detecting active virtues in Christopher Menaul’s film takes some digging. John Hannah occupies a whole little picture of his own, steaming open suspect envelopes in the post office and pursing his lips. Peter Wight’s knitwear is excellent.
The whole look and tone, though, is 50 shades of beige, while Seagrove and her film swing between the two modes of jolly stoicism and abject suffering. She must pull out all the stops, stricken with despair and half-starved, in a climactic train sequence, dramatised from fact, which would defeat a Dench, scupper a Streep, and this on their best days. It’s a lot to ask of a Seagrove.
