Review: Scarlett Johansson, Sienna Miller and Emily Beecham are sisters in Kristin Scott Thomas' superb ‘My Mother's Wedding'

San Francisco Chronicle​

2 days ago

Kristin Scott Thomas has directed and co-written a film that in the best way borrows from her own life without descending into a straight autobiography. In 'My Mother's Wedding,' she takes a tragedy from her childhood and places it in a fictional context that allows the story to deepen, expand and find its wings.
The all-important germ of truth behind 'My Mother's Wedding' is that when Thomas was five years old, her father, a military pilot, was killed in a training exercise. Her mother remarried another pilot, but this stepfather was also killed in a training exercise, when Thomas was 11. So she grew up feeling the absence of two fathers in her life.
Thomas transplants this circumstance to a modern family. Scarlett Johansson, Sienna Miller and Emily Beecham play three sisters, who grew up, as Thomas did, having lost two fathers. The three come home for the wedding of their mother (Thomas), who, after many years, is marrying her third husband.
Each of the sisters is highly functional, yet screwed up in some fundamental way. Miller makes the most of the juicy role of Victoria, a screen actress who specializes in trashy, commercial movies. Her love life has been a crowded and endless series of men and busted up relationships.
Johansson plays Katherine who, following the military example of her two fathers, is a highly successful Naval officer, but her personal life is strained. She's too distant to fully engage with her girlfriend (Freida Pinto) and disappears for long stretches without contact. Katherine is as introverted as Victoria is extroverted, and it makes for a dull role — or at least a dull performance from Johansson.
The youngest sister, Georgina ( Beecham) is a nurse, who is married with children. But her husband is a creep — loud, flashy and insensitive — who cheats on her relentlessly.
The personalities of these characters and of the actresses playing them are so distinct that it takes a long while for it to sink in that all three women are still struggling with the same loss. Victoria is replacing her fathers with a succession of lovers; Katherine is protecting herself from grief by staying emotionally remote; and Georgina is holding on to a ridiculous husband and a toxic marriage out of fear of experiencing further loss.
Miller is a pleasure in every scene she's in, and Beecham, as Georgina, grows with the role and becomes just as interesting as her more famous costars.
The movie finds ways to stay interesting from scene to scene, and though in a couple of places the screenplay seems to be pushing the actresses into conflicts that are barely there, for the most part 'My Mother's Wedding' feels emotionally true. Still, the best part of the movie, by far, belongs to Thomas.
In a way, it's almost diabolically sneaky. Thomas gets big ticket actresses to star in her movie but then hands herself the film's single great scene. It comes when the mother and her grown daughters are visiting the gravesite of their two lost fathers. Simply, with little fuss or emphasis, Thomas launches into a brilliant monologue in which she talks about her late husbands and counsels her daughters in the ways they need to get on with their lives.
The speech shows why fiction is usually more powerful than autobiography. Through this monologue of a mother talking to her daughters, Thomas gets to address her younger self — or younger selves — distilling a lifetime's accumulated wisdom into a few minutes of screen time.
If it were anyone else, this scene might represent the summit of their art, but Thomas has had too great a career to say anything that reckless. But certainly, this scene is up there with her best work in ' I've Loved You So Long,' ' Leaving,' ' Love Crime ' and 'The English Patient.'