From Local Hero to The Full Monty and Fisherman’s Friends, the feel-good comedy has always been a staple of British cinemas. Mother’s Pride fits neatly alongside these and others. Set in Somerset, it’s the sort of movie designed to appeal to the real ale crowd, with its story of a small, independent pub going up against a successful chain and brewing its way to success. The film stars Martin Clunes as Mick, the curmudgeonly landlord of The Drovers Arms, an ale house on its last legs.
It’s not hard to see why. Mick is still grief-stricken over the loss of his wife. Living with son Jake (James Buckley), a single parent, he’s also cut up about the disappearance of his other son Cal (Jonno Davies), who took off to become a musician and never even returned for his mother’s funeral. But this failed pop star with just one hit to his name, ‘Guiding Light’, now returns, broke and with his tail between his legs. Mick hardly welcomes him with open arms.
With bills mounting up and the bailiffs hovering, the pub is facing repossession – until Cal takes it upon himself to dive into his grandfather’s recipe book and start concocting a mild ale. “Brewing’s in our blood,” he says, and despite an early cock-up – way too much sugar in the mix gives them all a blinding hangover – they come up with a brew that might yet save the pub. The plan is to enter it into a regional competition before heading to the finals in London, in the hope that a high-profile win might give the pub a blaze of much-needed publicity.
Director Nick Moorcroft knows exactly how to chisel out these family-friendly regional comedies. With Meg Leonard, he co-wrote Cornish male choir tale Fisherman’s Friends and its 2022 sequel Fisherman’s Friends: One And All, which he directed, and he and Leonard re-team here. Much like the Fisherman’s Friends films, this offers few surprises but plenty of charm. The script is a little too over-stuffed – family grief, mental health, and single parenthood are all squeezed in – and the innuendo in some scenes gets a bit tiresome (jokes about dogging don’t fit).
Still, Moorcroft casts this cosy charmer with some familiar faces: Mark Addy as a barfly; Whose Line Is It Anyway? staple Josie Lawrence as a saucy local; and Luke Treadaway, as rival brewer Pritchard, whose family owns a string of pubs and is the two-time winner of the brewing competition that The Drovers Arms is entering. Then there’s Gabriella Wilde as schoolteacher Abi, the local girl left behind by Cal, who has since hooked up with Prichard, against her better judgement.
View Green Video on the source websiteClunes’s misery act is fun, furthering his recent renaissance after his sublime turn in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, while the talented Davies gets to show us his more human side – following his CG-monkey in the Robbie Williams biopic Better Man. The shaggy-haired Buckley also shows how he’s matured as an actor, far removed from his puerile pupil Jay in The Inbetweeners. Fear not, though, for he does deliver the occasional zinger (“like something Keith Richards coughed up,” he says, after a night on the homebrew).
Along the way, there are some amusing scenes, especially when Addy’s Paxman and Buckley’s Jake go Morris Dancing to ’70s funk like ‘Daddy Cool’ and ‘DISCO’, and Moorcroft even manages to shoehorn in a nod to how many pubs are closing down every month in Britain, suggesting we guard against old traditions from disappearing and being swallowed up by corporate greed. Like an inoffensive light ale, the result slips down more pleasantly than you might expect.
Mother's Pride is now showing in UK cinemas.
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