Mother (2009)

On the surface, Mother looks like the Korean equivalent of a Sunday-night BBC one-off legal drama. It's about a mother who will go to any length to look after her mentally disabled son, who has inadvertently caught a murder rap for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's the sort of thing that's kept Linda La Plante in Elnett over the last 30years.
But as much as you've seen this sort of thing way too many times to care anymore, Mother pulls off the impossible by bringing something new to this sort of story. Not that I can put my finger on it... maybe it's just weird that they're doing it in Korea... i don't know. Maybe it's that the director Bong Joon-ho's last picture was a monster-movie called The Host and hasn't got all Alan J. Pakula and bored with the genre. I'll say now that I think it's too long at 2hrs but I generally think that... honestly I was most impressed by how vibrant this film about an elderly woman and her disabled son was. This is no guff- it starts off like that Chris Cunningham Gucci perfume advert for perfume and continues to be visually interesting with all sorts of tricks. More importantly, it's incredibly well written with bona fire twists and turns, although that might be down to a lost-in-translation jawn but it's working either way.  The world that Joon-you and his co-writer is fairly bleak and perhaps corrupt but the characters shown themselves to be less evil, more lazy and prone to broad conclusions, like the cops are crap and lack dedication at their job but no more crap than I was at working the call-centre circuit.
The 21st leads, Hye-ja Kim as the mother and Bin Won, as her son are really well drawn characters. I'm sure no one would be surprised by the lengths this woman goes to prove her sons innocence or how protective she is of him as you'd intuitively expect that of your mother but the success of the actress is that, it's not over the top and she is moderately irritating, the way she coddles this grown young man but you can tell, she always trying to do her best for him. Won has an equally difficult role to pitch as he has to play a young man with all the trappings of what young men aspire to while playing him with learning difficulties and aquits himself pretty well too. You don't pity the kid and you soon forget about his physical difficulties though the actor never does.
Mother is a great tonic to the sort of crime procedurals we must all be bored with by now- it's lucid, curious and challenging. Not a Mother's Day gift though...

I watched Mother (2009) on DVD via LoveFilm.
My 2011 in Movies will return with The Shock Doctrine (2009)...