An Irish adaptation of Garcia Di Gregorio’s acclaimed 2008 film Mid-August Lunch, director Darren Thornton’s Four Mothers is the story of Edward (James McArdle) and his 81-year-old mother Alma (the excellent Fionnula Flanagan), who has had a stroke and can only communicate through an iPad. The stairlift is in constant use, as is her bell. And there are jokes about pouffes.
Set in suburban Dublin, it’s warm-hearted and charming in a lukewarm way, but although it’s based on Darren Thornton and his co-writer brother Colin’s experiences with their own mother, who had a degenerative disease, it’s not particularly engaging or convincing. (The brothers’ previous film, A Date for Mad Mary (2016), won two Irish Film and Television Awards.)
Edward, Alma’s primary, and very patient, carer, is a gay YA novelist whose book, a love story about two young men already published to some fanfare in Ireland, is apparently about to take the USA by storm. As he tries to do a radio interview on his laptop, the iPad’s robotic voice rings out from the bathroom, where his mother is stationed: “Slow down, Edward. They’re American and they won’t understand your accent.” His agent is urging him to travel there for a major book tour; Ann Patchett is scheduled to interview him in her Nashville bookstore, no less.
Understandably, he wants to make arrangements for his mother to go into respite care or to stay with his brother in London for a couple of weeks while he’s gone, but she’s not having any of it. His recently out therapist/friend Dermot (Rory O’Neill, aka drag queen Panti Bliss), who he hasn’t paid in five years, tells him that he’s avoiding his destiny as an artist and that he should start taking care of himself instead of others.
However this doesn’t prevent Dermot from dumping his own mother on Edward when he decides, along with two other quarrelsome gay friends of Edward’s (Adam Fergus and Gearóid Farrelly) who both live with their ageing mothers, to go to the Maspalomas Pride festival in Gran Canaria. “I know what we’re doing is abominable, but if we don’t get away we might die,” they tell him via voice message. “All we’re asking for is three nights. Just give them a bed and keep them fed and watered.”
Suddenly Edward is in charge of three extra mothers, Jean, Rosey and Maude (Dearbhla Molloy, Paddy Glynn and Stella McCusker, all impressive), crammed nightmarishly into the small, drab house he shares with Alma. An unlikely scenario, not least because they’re all in fairly good nick (though refreshingly untouched by cosmetic procedures) and look like they could probably manage on their own. Alma herself is marvellously well groomed and fully compos mentis. 
None of them know each other, apparently have little in common and all are ungrateful, critical and demanding. “Edward, you are being a doormat,” Alma taps out on the iPad as he scurries around with pillows and takes food orders. You have to agree: he’s too much of a pushover to be fully believable.“I am sick of them, I want to go to bed,” taps out Alma.
The proceedings are punctuated with annoying videos from Maspalomas, where everyone is having an outrageously flamboyant time. Conversations become deeper and more meaningful, though never quite spiky enough. Jean scoffs, as she swigs at a bottle of hard liquor, at Edward’s sensitivity about the fights between his parents that he had to witness. That’s just the way things were, she says, and it did you no harm. Not really, replies Edward. “We’re all in therapy, crippled with anxiety and incapable to sustaining meaningful relationships." But Jean has fallen asleep.
The main solace is the physio, Raf (Gaetan Garcia, pictured above with McArdle as Edward), who used to be Edward’s boyfriend and for whom he still yearns. Raf also does palmistry and drives a community care bus, useful for ferrying the mothers around to medical appointments – though Jean escapes at one point to a karaoke night at a pub – and to Galway, a six-hour road trip, to consult a medium (Niamh Cusack). The trip is, of course, bonding, even joyful, with the ladies dishing out competing stories about dealing with gay sons. And perhaps these mothers will even be able to care for each other, allowing Edward to branch out at last.
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