Without that refracting gaze, “The Mother” would feel tediously familiar indeed. Anne belongs to a restless breed common to fiction and film of the 1960s and ’70s (“The Happy Ending,” “Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams”) — the embittered wife and mother who, in middle age, is deprived of her raison d’être when her children leave home. “I’ve been had, all the way down the line,” is how Anne sums up her married life.
With her husband of 25 years, Peter (an appropriately exasperated Chris Noth), Anne has two grown children, a son and a daughter. (This version appears to be set in New York, though Anne herself is French.) But it’s the son, Nicolas (the elegant, self-contained Justice Smith), whose absence she mourns so obsessively. Now living with a girlfriend, Nicolas never calls or visits.
Anne also suspects that Peter isn’t really attending all those late staff meetings that make him later for dinner, and she sure doesn’t buy his claim that he’s going to a weekend seminar in Buffalo when the play begins. She tells him so in very blunt language, in savage curses sandwiched between mechanical repetitions of wifely phrases: “How about you? How was your day?”
Though we hear the vicious insults, it’s not clear that Peter does. Mr. Zeller reprises the opening scene in a slightly different key, but with the same blurring of inner and outer worlds.
Then Nicolas shows up at the breakfast table the next morning, having had a fight with his girlfriend. But is he really there? If not, he’s lucky, since the wiles Anne deploys to keep her boy at her side are the stuff of Oedipal nightmares. (Her tools of persuasion include a tiny red dress, black stockings, very high heels and a slew of pharmaceuticals.)
And just wait until the girlfriend, Emily (Odessa Young), shows up, wearing a dress just like Anne’s. (Anita Yavich did the costumes.) Or is she Anne’s daughter? Or Peter’s mistress? Or Anne herself?
