Word: motheral
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Night, Mother is the screen adaptation of Marsha Norman's Tony-winning stage play about the confrontation between a mother and daughter before the daughter's suicide. In simple, elegant scenes the comfortable monotony of daily tasks is made eerie and frighteningly unusual...
Finally, the room is empty--nothing is left behind to suggest that Jessie ever lived there. Once the bags have been shipped to their intended charities, the knickknacks replaced and probably lost among her mother's already cluttered bedroom and the garbage emptied, Jessie's existence will have been effectively obliterated. And this, as we learn later on, is just how she wants it, for it is her intention to exit from life without a trace...
...film's action--what there is of it--begins when Jessie's mother Thelma (Anne Bancroft) returns home from an afternoon at the country fair. Bubbling over with superficial spontaneity and weighted down with multifarious milk jugs slated for immediate conversion to lamps, Thelma is blissfully unsuspecting of anything unusual, like a suicide, on the horizon. "Where are my house shoes, sugar?" she gurgles. "It's still light out sugar, why don't you come see the begonias?" And so, we are not surprised to learn that Jessie no longer ventures into the outside world...
Jessie's revelation that this Saturday night will be her last comes without anger, confrontation, hysterics or tears. As she cleans and oils the revolver with which she will do the deed, she simply and quietly informs her mother that she is about to kill herself. This is no rash decision--she has been thinking about it "on and off" for no less than 10 years; "on all the time," since the previous Christmas...
...NEXT hour and a half, 'night, Mother reproduces Marsha Norman's minutely choreographed jockeying between mother and daughter, the former trying to persuade the latter to abandon her ghoulish intention and the latter holding fast to her position...