The Mother by Paddy Chayefsky

 The Mother

Written by Paddy Chayefsky
Directed by Simon Curtis

“I’m 66 years old and I don’t know what the purpose of it all was.”

This is a 1994 Channel 13/BBC TV production of Chayefsky’s 1954 TV play. Starring Anne Bancroft as the 66 year old widow and empty nester looking for meaning in her life as she faces aging and loneliness in a world that passes her by.

  Set in NYC, she wants employment, partly for self support but mostly for her spirit, for something to do. She worked on a sewing machine in the garment district until her marriage in 1916 and now 40 years later goes back into the high-pressure, need-for-speed industry, with a bullying boss (Stephen Lang) and predictable results.
Joan Cusack is her daughter who is married with a young child, worries about her mother, and wants to take her in.

There is a scene in which mother wonders what to do with the furniture and others things of her life with her late husband. The daughter doesn’t want to chair that father sat in. But mother points out that is it perfectly good. She doesn’t want her things abandoned to the junk man. 

The daughter doesn’t want the chair. She says that they have a house full of modern furniture and the things of her mother will not fit in.
Paddy Chayefsky was a young man in 1954 but apparently had a sensitivity to the old and the lonely. This is around the same time as a more famous TV play Marty which again features working class loneliness and later made into the theatrical movie that propelled Ernest Borgnine to Oscar winning star status.
Ageing and loneliness also drive Chayefsky’s fine Broadway play Middle on the Night concerning a hopeless May/December romance Filmed in 1958 with Fredric March the aging garment industry factory owner and Kim Novak as a worker who becomes his beautiful young lover. A very fine movie.

  

Ray Meets Helen (2018) By Alan Rudolph

I watched this new movie. Not out at the movie theater. I haven’t been to a movie theater in awhile. I watched it at home as a streaming rental from one of those big companies that sell that kind of stuff.

The movie is about a couple of old people down on their luck. Well, they just don’t have money which is part of the same thing. And Ray, played by Keith Carradine, is worse off than that because he has some kind of looming health crisis.

Anyway, they both come by some money separately and unbelievably. Then they meet up in a fancy/snobbish restaurant

Ray Meets Helen was written and directed by Alan Rudolph. We had watched a couple others of his movies lately including the great Choose Me with Keith Carradine again except it was made 40 years ago when he was a handsome young man and not the old guy he is and plays as Ray.
Movies are funny that way. Now with access to a lot of older movies practically instantly, one can watch someone go from young to old, well, to almost dead with a few clicks within the same hour.

This gives me the impression that life just zips by, that we are all young and old and here and gone at the same time and linier time is totally an illusion.

At any rate in this movie Carradine is old and so is Sandra Locke who plays Helen and so is Alan Rudolph who got all this together.

But one thing remains the same. That is that Alan Rudolph makes very amusing and thought provoking movies about the randomness of love/sex relationship. Because in a way, this movie is not at all remote from Choose Me.

I buy into this actually. These things are random here in the modern timeless USA. They have certainly been random in my life. My viewing companion and me as an example. I just saw her photo of Facebook one day maybe 6 years ago and throught, “Wow! I want THAT one.”

And here we are moments/years/instantly now/later. Just like in the movie when Ray approaches Helen in the restaurant.

Funny how things work that way.

Delightful how Alan Rudolph sees that and shows it to us in his hyper-realistic believable/unbelievable entertainments. He totally gets it. My kind of filmmaker for sure.