My Mother’s Wedding: Comedy and Drama Divorced in Kristin Scott Thomas Directorial Debut

By Liz Braun

Rated: B

My Mother’s Wedding is a perfectly nice film. It’s tough not to think that it might have been much more.

An uneasy mix of domestic drama and romcom humour, the film is Dame Kristin Scott Thomas’ directorial debut. She also stars here and co-wrote the story with her husband, John Micklethwait.

My Mother’s Wedding revolves around three sisters who are gathering at their childhood home for their mother’s third marriage — mother (Scott Thomas) has been widowed twice. The story has its roots in the filmmaker’s own life, as Scott Thomas lost her father and her stepfather, both armed forces pilots, by the time she was 11 years old.

Against the background of the wedding, each of the adult sisters struggles with her own emotional well-being and with various father issues.

Oldest child Katherine (Scarlett Johansson) has followed her late father into service and is a captain in the Royal Navy, a huge job that has made her an absent parent to her son and a neglectful presence to her partner.

Next is Sienna Miller as Victoria, a well-known actress with a string of worthless relationships behind her. The youngest is Georgina (Emily Beecham), a devoted mother and hard-working nurse with a terrible husband.

My Mother’s Wedding delves into each of the sisters’ domestic situations. Johansson is very serious as Katherine, who has strong but vaguely anxious memories of her father and stepfather (told in animated sequences).

Both Miller and Beecham portray characters whose issues are played mostly for laughs. As Victoria, Miller is a self-centred, vapid actress. As Georgina, Beecham must contend with a philandering buffoon of a husband.

The sisters argue amongst themselves, annoy their mother, fuss and fight over their romantic relationships and deal with their own children. Those children and various boyfriends, partners, and husbands wander in and out of the story.

Will Katherine resolve her conflicted feelings about motherhood and marriage? Will Victoria reject her latest rich-but-worthless-suitor and consider love? Will Georgina summon up the courage to jettison her terrible husband?

Reader: you won’t care. You’ll wonder why Scott Thomas undercuts her own storytelling and a thoughtful message about family dynamics with comedic bits that are a tad broad. (Is the aged groom really going to stumble into the wrong bedroom in the dead of night and encounter a naked Sienna Miller? Really? Under that famed froideur, is Dame Kristin hiding a Carry On! sensibility?)

The drama and the comedy in My Mother’s Wedding never quite meld.

There is one stupendous scene in the film wherein Scott Thomas scolds her daughters for their childish behaviour, disabuses them of their hero-worshiping ideas about their late fathers and urges them to begin taking better care of their own children.

It’s the heart of My Mother’s Wedding and surprisingly moving, even as it reveals how much better Scott Thomas is as an actor than the rest of her cast. Likewise, there are a few moments of comedy between Scott Thomas and Sindhu Vee — just a couple of women chatting as friends and fellow mothers-in-law — that are inspired.

Those bits are enough to keep you interested in what Scott Thomas directs next. My Mother’s Wedding first played at TIFF 2023 under the title North Star.

Read our interview with Kristin Scott Thomas

My Mother’s Wedding. Directed by Kristin Scott Thomas, written by Kristen Scott Thomas and John Micklethwait. Starring Scarlet Johansson, Sienna Miller, Emily Beecham, Frida Pinto, and Sindhu Vee. In theatres August 8.