Decades into her career and now firmly a grande dame of acting, with a BAFTA and an Olivier on her mantle, as well as an Oscar nomination (for The English Patient), Kristin Scott Thomas has in her writing and directorial debut cannily cast herself in a plum supporting role – she’s the titular mother – and gifted herself the film’s standout monologue. She’s still captivating; gorgeous and flinty and capable of turning on a dime. You wish this was her story instead.
That focus is ceded to her three adult daughters, who have come home to Cornwall for Mom Diana’s third marriage. Concerned you won’t be able to tell the daughters apart, even though they’re played by well-established actresses, including one who just made headlines as cinema’s internationally top-grossing movie star? Upon first introduction, each woman gets a quick descriptor scribbled onscreen: Georgina (Beecham) is the nurse; Victoria (Miller), the Hollywood movie star; and eldest Katherine (Johansson, of the $15-billion-box office), the naval captain. Initially, it’s harder to distinguish the sisters’ various children, who arrive en masse for the wedding weekend, but that’s sort of the point. Despite being fully adult themselves, these three sisters – struggling to communicate, seething with resentment, not always keeping close watch on their kids – still have some growing up of their own to do.
It’s sweet to see Johansson reunited with Scott Thomas; they first played mother and daughter in 1998’s The Horse Whisperer. But as the only American in the cast, her uniquely formal diction even more mannered with the burden of a British accent, and saddled with a character you might charitably call tight-lipped (she’s as blank and impenetrable as Stonehenge), the film suffers with her as its center of gravity. That’s as much a script problem – Scott Thomas wrote it with now-husband John Micklethwait, a journalist – as it is a performance problem. Johansson is trying to play a largely internal conflict, the details of which the script is maddeningly coy about for far, far too long, while an external conflict with her partner (Pinto) strains credulity. Scott Thomas’ solution is to insert animated sequences dramatizing young Katherine’s relationship with her father and her stepfather, both navy men lost in the line of duty. The story is personal – it closely matches that of Scott Thomas, and she dedicates the film to her two fathers – but these wispy animated inserts are so cloying they dampen the sincere sentiment behind the story.
Tonally, My Mother’s Wedding careens from pure schmaltz to broad comedy to genuinely affecting meditation on grief’s staying power. It’s a shame, with this much talent in front of and behind the camera, a more precise picture couldn’t emerge from material so obviously close to the heart.
This article appears in August 8 • 2025.