Mother's Boys Blu-ray offers decent video and audio in this enjoyable Blu-ray release
A stylish, provocative suspense thriller guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your seat! After Jude Madigan abruptly deserts her family, husband Robert and their young children slowly build a happy new life with another woman. But when Jude unexpectedly returns three years later, her dangerous obsession to reclaim her former life threatens to destroy everything that dares stand in her way! Packed with heart-stopping excitement and compelling intrigue, this riveting, seductive, cliff-hanger entertains from beginning to end!
For more about Mother's Boys and the Mother's Boys Blu-ray release, see the Mother's Boys Blu-ray Review published by Michael Reuben on March 18, 2013 where this Blu-ray release scored 3.0 out of 5.
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 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.
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 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.
