Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.0
Audio		3.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.0

Mother's Boys Blu-ray Movie Review

Mommy's Been Bad

Reviewed by Michael Reuben March 18, 2013

Jamie Lee Curtis' early success in Halloween (1978) condemned her to a long period of typecasting as a B-movie scream queen, but she eventually broke out into a wide array of parts as a comedienne (A Fish Called Wanda and Freaky Friday), sex symbol (Trading Places), woman of action (Blue Steel) or all three at the same time (True Lies). In 1994's Mother's Boys, Curtis applied her talents to the flipside of the stalked victim she'd so often played in her early career. She became the hunter instead of the hunted, but with a distinctively feminine twist. She portrayed a mother so badly damaged that she was willing to rip her children apart psychologically (and others physically) to get what she wanted.

Curtis' performance is the main reason to see Mother's Boys, because her portrayal of the desperate matriarch is so uncomfortably manipulative and insinuatingly sexual that it puts to shame the depictions of family abuse that have become a stock explanation for criminal behavior in many police procedurals. Curtis elevates the material for as long as she can (with assists from Vanessa Redgrave and Luke Edwards) by keeping the focus on family dynamics. At a certain point, though, the cast, the director, Yves Simoneau, and the film itself are sabotaged by the derivative script (adapted from a novel by Bernard Taylor), which substitutes trite plot mechanics for credible psychology. You can get away with this sort of thing when your villain is a faceless killing machine like Michael Myers, but when the previous hour has been about real people with credible (if abnormal) psyches, the story needs more than extended stunts for a satisfying resolution.

Three years ago, Jude Madigan (Curtis) walked out on her architect husband, Robert (Peter Gallagher), and their three sons, Kes (Edwards), Michael (Colin Ward) and Ben (Joey Zimmerman). The marriage had already been troubled, for reasons that gradually emerge over the course of the film, primarily through the eyes of Jude's mother, Lydia (Vanessa Redgrave), who cares for her daughter but sees her clearly for who she is. Lydia's primary concern is for the well-being of her grandsons. Michael and Ben were young enough when their mother left to have adapted to her absence. Kes, the eldest, has never recovered from the hurt and anger caused by her desertion. He remains sullen and withdrawn and requires frequent visits to the office of his school's principal, Mr. Everett (J.E. Freeman).

Fortunately for Kes (though he doesn't always see it that way), he has a friend in the principal's office. The assistant principal, Callie Harland (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer), is the woman with whom Kes's father is now seriously involved. Indeed, he wants to marry her, once his attorney (the reliable Paul Guilfoyle) works out the technicalities of divorcing an absent spouse. Callie is naturally cautious. She's done her best to build relationships with Robert's children, but she won't move in with the family while their father remains legally married.

Thus matters stand when Jude suddenly reappears, smartly dressed, self-possessed and apparently well-funded (though exactly how is never explained). Her official plan is visitation and joint custody, but privately she urges Robert to resume their life together. She tells her lawyer (Joss Ackland) that's what she wants, to which he responds with practicality that there are some things the law cannot provide.

Convinced that Callie is the true obstacle to her reunion with her family, Jude begins a campaign to remove her from the picture—permanently, if necessary. She enlists Kes as her co-conspirator, using every means at her disposal, including, in a sequence worthy of Norman Bates's mother, preying on the pre-teen's awakening sexual curiosity. Kes's already divided loyalties make him easy prey, and his authority as the eldest give him a measure of influence over his younger brothers. These scenes of family manipulation are the film's most disturbing, because they rest on a kernel of truth that anyone with experience of divorce will immediately recognize, namely, that battling parents cannot help but try to win the sympathies of their kids, even if most of them do not go to the pathological extremes of Jude Madigan.

Having played the target of so many psychopaths who were mere plot functions, Curtis seems to have taken great pains to create a portrait of a disturbed individual whose actions make sense in human terms. It helps that the script (credited to Barry Schneider and Richard Hawley) provides enough backstory to supply a foundation for Jude's pathology and even suggests how she and Richard might once have managed as a couple, at least until children complicated the mix. Credit is also due to Luke Edwards, who was the same age when he made the film as Kes is supposed to be, and who conveys Kes's pain, confusion and rage with a simple directness that is essential to the story.

Unfortunately, director Simoneau (whose most recent project was the failed reboot of V) abandons all this intriguing and messy emotional truth for contrivances and the kind of convenient but artificial conclusion that Jude herself was trying to achieve, just in a different version. It's possible to make such a radical downshift work if you do it very quickly, as Hitchcock occasionally did (e.g., in Family Plot), but Simoneau goes in the opposite direction, with an extended action-and-suspense sequence during which the viewer has plenty of time to consider how unsuspenseful it all is, because the outcome is never in doubt. But who thought it was a good idea to take children experiencing the pain of divorce and put them in the kind of physical jeopardy better suited to a cheap Die Hard knock-off? Maybe they were planning a sequel called Mother's Boys: In Therapy.

Mother's Boys Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Mother's Boys was shot by Elliot Davis, who would later become Catherine Hardwicke's cinematographer of choice and was then in the midst of an extended collaboration with Steven Soderbergh (King of the Hill, Underneath, Out of Sight). The 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray from Echo Bridge offers an acceptable but not overwhelming presentation of Davis' photography. Detail is generally decent, and black levels and color saturation appear to be appropriate.

There is no indication of grain reduction or high frequency roll-off. However, the grain pattern in the image is far from natural-looking. While not frozen in place (so-called "hanging" grain), the grain doesn't flow with the natural movement that one experiences in a film-like image. Instead it jumps and shifts in quick, sharp motions that bespeak digital manipulation. The effect should not be noticeable unless you're looking for it (and, in the process, sitting much closer to your display than any recommended norm), but it has the effect of conferring a processed, artificial sheen over the entire image. The same digital processing is also responsible for an occasional phenomenon that looks like video noise, but on closer inspection, more closely resembles the shifting pattern associated with aliasing. It's generally limited to long shots.

Compression artifacts did not appear to be an issue, which is hardly surprising, given the film's short running time and the complete lack of extras and additional audio options.

Mother's Boys Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The film's original stereo mix is provided as DTS-HD MA 2.0, and it certainly sounds as good as one would hope. The dialogue is extremely clear, and various key sound effects that are obviously intended to be heard above all others (e.g., a dead frog being pierced with a scalpel in a science class, bath water running and sloshing in a tense scene) register with the intended force. George Clinton's suspenseful score manages not to go over the top until the end, when Clinton has no choice but to follow the film and crawl out onto a very long (and fragile) limb.

Mother's Boys Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Mother's Boys played in very few theaters, following a common practice by the Weinstein Brothers when they owned Miramax. If audience tracking didn't bode well for a film's prospects, they spent as little on prints and advertising as possible and looked to recoup their investment on video. Many interesting films (some of them far superior to Mother's Boys) were pushed out of theaters as a result, and most of those are now being shunted over to Echo Bridge by the new owners of Miramax. At least Echo Bridge seems to have improved the quality of their output. Their Blu-ray of Mother's Boys is a watchable version, for the street price, of a film that may not be good, but has good things in it. No recommendation either way. Decide for yourselves.