All women become like their mothers.
That is their tragedy.
No man does.
That’s his.
- Oscar Wilde
So opens Ken Wardrop’s deeply affecting documentary Mom and Me, a movie sure to bring sons and their mothers closer together – and further devastate those who have lost theirs.
Wardrop’s 2009 feature film debut His & Hers found the Irish documentarian getting women of all ages to open up about their relationships with men.
His sophomore effort, Mom and Me, sees the film-maker venture out to Oklahoma – described at the start of the picture as the “manliest state” in the US – to follow radio show personality Joe Cristiano, who, with Mother’s Day nearing, asks men to call in and discuss their mothers on air. Using the radio segment as a springboard, Wardrop drops in on the lives of the men who phone, each of whom have wildly different relationships with the women that brought them into the world.
Wanting to explore the effect a mother figure has on man’s masculinity, Wardrop conceived of the radio show device to unify all the stories. Remarkably, his strategy doesn’t play like the contrivance that it is, thanks to the (at times) painfully intimate exchanges he captures.
From an imprisoned drug addict desperate to connect with his mother, to a man who’s settling in with the sad realisation that his mother is losing her memory to Alzheimer’s, to a middle-aged man who’s finally warming to his mother after a rough upbringing: the relationships Wardrop depicts are all touching and involving.
If there’s one criticism to be levelled at Mom and Me, it’s that it’s too short. At a scant 76 minutes, each pair that Wardrop profiles only gets fleeting screen time. The subjects he assembled - who come from all walks of life, despite hailing from the same state - all act as if the camera’s not there. Their candour is fascinating.
It speaks volumes about Wardrop’s approach that he gets his mothers and sons to open up about their sometimes-fraught love for one another. That poignancy rings especially true when Wardrop pairs his mothers and sons up in single shots, to give them a forum to speak to one another about the bond that unifies them.
Together, each portrait melds to create a heartrending whole guaranteed to make men think to call their mothers more often. To those who have lost their mothers, the experience of watching Mom and Me might prove unbearable – it’s that touching.
