Herself

  • 23 Jan - 29 Jan, 2021
  • Mag The Weekly
  • Reviews

Phyllida Lloyd, best known for her work in the London theater scene, and especially for directing the jukebox musical Mamma Mia! and its subsequent film adaptation as well as the Meryl Streep-starring Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady, scales down her canvas with the low-key, Dublin-set drama Herself.

Lloyd's key collaborator here is Clare Dunne, starring as a working-class Dublin mother made homeless when she leaves her abusive husband. Dunne also co-wrote the screenplay, but the more impressive contribution here is definitely her performance, given the script is marbled with too many Anglo-Irish social realist clichés and stippled with melodrama.

It doesn't help that, thematically at least, Herself overlaps somewhat with Rosie, another Irish drama from 2018.

But where Rosie explored the desperation of homelessness with devastating understatement and the Kafka-esque bureaucracy that frustrates the protagonist's search for temporary accommodation each day, Herself's heroine Sandra Kelly (Dunne) discovers a more magical solution to a similar problem. When she finds herself stuck waiting for public housing for herself and her two young grade-school daughters in a hotel room paid for by the city, she decides to work around the problem by raising money to build a house from scratch with a loan from the bank and help from some friends.

Lucky for Sandra, she has some extremely generous friends. Cranky but ultimately kindly older posh lady Peggy, a widowed doctor for whom Sandra cleans house and helps out generally ever since Peggy broke her hip, is so inspired by Sandra's moxie she offers to give her a parcel of land in her own back garden big enough to take a modestly proportioned two-bedroomed cottage. Then, by some wondrous screenwriting coincidence, Sandra befriends a skilled builder, Aido, who agrees to help supervise her construction project practically for free just because he happens to know what a human turd Sandra's ex-husband Gary is. And there's that endearing moxie.

Before long, Sandra and Aido have assembled a motley crew to help with the project, one that includes Aido's adult son with Down syndrome, another mother from Sandra's daughters' school, and some friendly squatters who live with one of Sandra's co-workers at a cafe. This cheery rainbow alliance pulls together, despite a few testy moments, and Lloyd treats us to several cute musical montages as they all learn to dig foundations, pour concrete and hammer in nails straight.

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