MY MOTHER’S WEDDING – Review by Liz Braun

Dame Kristin Scott Thomas makes her feature directorial debut with My Mother’s Wedding, a family tale about love and loss with a great cast. The film premiered with the title North Star at the Toronto International Film Festival 2023. It is now being released in theatres by Vertical Entertainment.

The plot revolves around the reunion of three sisters who are gathering at the family home for their mother’s third marriage. Mom (Scott Thomas) has been twice married and twice widowed, a detail from Scott Thomas’ own life. As a child, the filmmaker lost her father and her stepfather — both armed forces pilots — within six years.

In My Mother’s Wedding, the three sisters struggle with paternal loss and with all the other exigencies of adult life: their work, their home life, their significant others, their own children.

The sisters are played by Sienna Miller, here in a mostly comedic role as Victoria, a famous and wildly self-centred actress who keeps pairing up with worthless men; Scarlett Johansson is Katherine, who has followed her father into service and is a captain in the Royal Navy, a huge career that makes her an often absent mother; and Emily Beecham is Georgina, a nurse with a rotten marriage.

(Johansson is meant to be English; she has the right accent, but culture affects facial expressions, body language, etc. so it doesn’t quite wash.)

Much of the family angst is played out by Johansson, whose anxious memories of childhood appear throughout the film as bits of black and white animation — among them, a memory of hearing about her father’s fatal mishap in a TV news broadcast.

And she feels guilty for disappointing her beloved stepfather on another occasion. She also struggles with guilt for devoting more of her time to her work than to her son or partner (played by Frida Pinto). Her sisters’ problems are played more for laughs, and not always successfully.

The sisters squabble amongst themselves, annoy their mother and engage in a few rounds of physical comedy, but none of it seems to fit together. Various children, boyfriends and husbands wander in and out of the narrative.

There is one very strong scene in which Scott Thomas gives her girls a dressing down for behaving like children, and she urges them to grow up and take care of their own children properly. It’s a great scene and Scott Thomas is wonderful, but it has the unfortunate effect of showing how very much better she is here than the rest of her cast.

A large part of what ails My Mother’s Wedding is the writing. The film was co-written by Scott Thomas and her husband, John Micklethwait, and is loosely based on Scott Thomas’ family history. The drama and the comedy never quite meld.

The movie ends with a nod to the passage of time, a brief but moving moment that suggests My Mother’s Wedding could have been another sort of story altogether. If so, it’s a tale obscured by too many characters and distractions.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a revised version of Liz Braun’s Toronto International Film Festival review of North Star, originally published on AWFJ.org on September 20, 2023.