John (Bill Hoversten) calls his mother on Mother's Day, and as ever so
often of late, he has to notice she's not all there, as she has forgotten
he has moved from the East to the West Coast years ago, that she has in
fact met his wife (Kat Kramer) he has been married to for years, and
ultimately she thinks its her own 10th birthday party. She gets so
agitated that John's father (Conrad Bachmann) eventually intervenes, who
takes good care of mum, even if John doesn't always approve of his
methods. Half a year later, John's dad is dead, and John returns to the
East Coast to set things up for his mother who can't live on her own in
the condition he's in - and once back, he learns some important lessons
about himself, on both an emotional and a factual level ... Mother's
Day Memories is a very heart-warming tale about dementia, one that
works quite as well as it does as it doesn't just let the mother's
dementia take center stage and let everything else revolve just around it,
but weaves it into the story in a very subtle way and allows its
protagonist John a character arc that's about him rather than his mother's
condition. In other words, this is no film to hammer a message home but
one to tell a quite touching story, also thanks to a first rate cast, and
a directorial effort that creates the right atmosphere to give the film's
actors the necessary space to breathe - and in the process it will
probably drive the audience to shed a few tears, but without giving in to
the cheesy side of things.
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