Matthew d’Ancona’s culture: How Four Mothers connects generational divides

Loosely inspired by Gianni Di Gregorio’s Mid-August Lunch (2008), this is an absolute gem of a movie. Edward (James McArdle, excellent) is a mid-thirties writer living in Dublin, on the verge of break-out success with his YA gay romance novel, and caring for his widowed mother Alma (Fionnula Flanagan), who has suffered a stroke and communicates with him using a voice-generation programme on her tablet.

As he prepares nervously for a book tour in the US, where his writing is already a TikTok sensation, his three friends Colm (Gearoid Farrelly), Billy (Gordon Hickey) and recently-out Dermot (Rory O’Neill) leave their mothers with him so that they can escape to Maspalomas Winter Pride for a weekend of hedonism. 

Alongside Alma, then, Edward must look after Jean (Dearbhla Molloy), Rosie (Paddy Glynn) and Maud (Stella McCusker) – and sleep in his car. To break the monotony, the unlikely troupe embarks on a minibus road trip to Galway to visit a medium played, in a lovely cameo, by Niamh Cusack. The ensuing tarot séance could have been a mawkish embarrassment but turns out to be the emotional hinge of the film.

Directed by Darren Thornton and co-written by his brother Colin, Four Mothers is more ambitious than its gentle dramatic parameters suggest. Notionally, Edward is resentful towards Alma because she is holding him back from stardom in America. 

But flip the psychology and you soon see that their relationship is one of deep co-dependency, in which he uses his caring responsibilities as a convenient means of postponing the next phase of his life and career. Therein lies a deep and profoundly contemporary consideration of the duty the generations have to each other, the two-way traffic of anxiety that courses between them and the eternal quest to reconcile social obligation with creative destiny.

Streaming

Twitter: Breaking the Bird (iPlayer)

So consumed have we become by the sulphurous pathologies of X that it is easy to forget the social network’s often inglorious history before Elon Musk bought it for $44 billion in 2022. Kate Quine’s intelligent documentary takes us back to Twitter’s beginnings – “just a ragtag group of people in a crummy office in San Francisco”, as co-founder Biz Stone recalls – before its launch in July 2006.

In the words of Ev Williams, one of the other prime movers, the initial mood of the start-up was “hallucinogenically optimistic”. And, to be fair, this was the prevailing ethos of what was then known as Web 2.0: the deep conviction that the convergence of social media, smartphones and increasingly available broadband would inspire the democratisation of knowledge, end tyrannies and turbocharge decency around the planet. I know: sounds weird now, doesn’t it?

What began as idealism quickly curdled into wilful blindness. As the founders of Twitter struggled to keep the platform up and running – it frequently didn’t work – and to handle the consequences of its growing popularity with celebrities, they neglected the colossal issues posed by the surging success of the network: user safety, free speech, misinformation, incitement to violence. 

Ariel Waldman, a community manager at another tech company, recounts the woeful nonchalance with which Twitter treated her when she demanded, in 2008, that her cyber-stalker be banned. Jack Dorsey – twice Twitter’s CEO – emerges as a mercurial, faddish and detached figure, quite unequal to the task he had set himself. At one of the company’s “forced fun” events, he asks Musk himself, whose face is visible on a huge screen: “By the way, do you want to run Twitter?” It’s a joke, but also a dark premonition.

During the pandemic, Dorsey was allegedly useless when asked by his team to engage with the pressing issue of health misinformation and the rise of conspiracism. When the January 6 insurrection posed the greatest question of all – should Donald Trump’s account be taken down? – he was on his yacht in French Polynesia (it is chilling to be reminded that, on that day, “Hang Mike Pence” was trending).

In the end, Dorsey conspired in the desecration of his original dream. “Elon is the singular solution I trust,” he said. “I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness”. How’s that light looking now, Jack?

Streaming

The Bondsman (Prime Video)

From the first chords of Norman Greenbaum’s Spirit in the Sky, we sense that dark mischief is afoot in Landry, Georgia – and moments later, bail enforcer Hub Halloran (Kevin Bacon) is dead, a bullet in his back and his throat cut.

Except that, somehow, he then wakes up, the worse for wear but very much alive. Contacted by the “Pot O’Gold company”, he is informed that Satan himself has restored him to the land of the living to continue his work as a bondsman; but from now on, it will be escaped demons that he must track down.

The weary shrug with which Hub and, in due course, his mother Kitty (Beth Grant) accept this daft premise is what makes this eight-part series so entertaining. Hub already has plenty to worry about – his teenage son Cade, ex-wife Maryanne (Jennifer Nettles), and her new husband Lucky Callahan (Damon Herriman) – without fretting too much about the precise necromantic means by which he has been brought back to life.

More important is his working relationship with his new boss Midge (Jolene Purdy), who works for the Devil alongside her home bakery business (as she observes, “I have found that it is the employees that can find the silver lining in all of this that have the best experience”).

There are plenty of jump scares, sinister pentagrams and grisly special effects (including a flame-breathing chainsaw). But what makes The Bondsman more than just another Southern Gothic cliché-fest is the screwball dialogue, especially between Hub and his mother (Hub: “Gonna need a new bear trap”; Kitty: “And I gotta find a new church”). 

When her son goes in pursuit of a particular kind of demon, she looks it up on Wikipedia to give him some last-minute tips. In its sharp humour, the show owes much to Constantine (2005) and Lucifer (2016-21).

Creator Grainger David and showrunner Erik Oleson also show how well the half-hour episode format works with this kind of hokum. And they throw in country music for good measures. Turns out the Devil really does have the best tunes.

Book

Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress and Dr Crippen, by Hallie Rubenhold (Doubleday)

EP Thompson famously warned that too much historical writing tends to be complicit in “the enormous condescension of posterity”; demeaning, caricaturing or ignoring entirely those who are not selected for the scholar’s focus. But, as she showed in the Ballie Gifford-winning The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (2019) and shows once more in this riveting account of the Crippen case, Hallie Rubenhold has done precisely the opposite in her work.

In Story of a Murder, she takes the familiar tale of Hawley Harvey Crippen and his lover Ethel Le Neve, their flight and capture after the murder of Crippen’s wife, Cora, and trial in 1910, and reframes it with bold and compelling imagination. The pursuit of Crippen and his Le Neve by DCI Walter Dew of Scotland Yard, their apprehension before they reached Canada and their trial (Crippen was convicted and hanged, while Le Neve was acquitted): all this is told in gripping detail, reflecting the author’s formidable command of the source material.

But the quack doctor and his lover are not the heart of Rubenhold’s story. Born Kunegunde Mackamotzki in Brooklyn in 1873 and known in her music hall performances as Belle Elmore, Cora was a vibrant and popular figure, who was nonetheless vilified in the trial as having “an ungovernable temper” and, by one journalist, as “animal, seductive and intolerable”.

In fact, it was her friends in the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild that first suspected foul play after her death. Their persistence – not least in testifying at the trial – was essential to Crippen’s eventual conviction.

It is entirely correct, then, that Belle is on the cover of the book. Rubenhold is also terrific on the backdrop to the story, the shifting context of the tale she is telling – from Gilded Age New York to the bohemian milieu of Edwardian music hall. She shows how much can be revealed by a historian willing to shift the camera a few degrees to the right or left and capture the unexpected, the dismissed and the disempowered. A must-read.

RIP VAL KILMER (1959-2025)

Though he will probably be remembered first and foremost as Tom “Iceman” Kazansky in the two Top Gun movies, Val Kilmer, who died on Tuesday, was an extraordinarily versatile actor whose range, intelligence and subtlety deserve to be honoured, too. If you haven’t seen them, do check out his performances as Doc Holliday in Tombstone (1993), Chris Shiherlis in Heat (1995) and “Gay” Perry van Shrike in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005).

Better yet, watch Leo Scott and Ting Poo’s documentary Val (2021), which includes plenty of footage shot over the years by Kilmer himself and movingly explores his experience of throat cancer. Best of all, pick up a copy online of Kilmer’s excellent memoir, I’m Your Huckleberry (2020), which is funny, erudite and the work of a man that Hollywood wanted to be a star but was always an artist.