Cotton Mary

Rating:
Summary: subtle and well-acted satire
Review: From the outset, I offer two cautions: the film is primarily satire, not the tepid bourgeois drama one typically associates with Merchant Ivory and, two, the steamy picture on the cover of the DVD has little to do with the main plot of the film.
These cautions are important because if you really like those earnest, self-important, plodding PBS telenovellas like The Jewel in the Crown, you are unlikely to be happy with this sharp and original work. Madhur Jaffrey gives a first-rate performance with the sort of creative adventurousness one usually associates more with live theater than commercial film. Cotton Mary is not likeable, though she is funny; it took guts for Jaffrey and Merchant not to sentimentalize the situation. It almost certainly cost them box office. But this is thoughtful film making and gutsy, hard as steel satire. This is something other than the usual soft hearted and soft minded claptrap usually cranked out about postcolonial India.
One quibble: it could have been shorter by at least 20 minutes. For instance, the whole Charley's Aunt business could have been eliminated without any serious loss in content.

Rating:
Summary: if you have to much time on your hand
Review: I love Greta Scacchi in most of her movies. I have to take exception to this one. This movie is so boring , one of the reason is that you do not care about any of the role played by the actors. All of the characters dipected in this movie are of
no interest at all . You cannot have any sympathy for any of them they are whithout a story . I have look at that movie 3 times and I cannot find anything good to say about it. Greta Scacchi who is good and sometime exellent in her movies is such a bore in this one. Don't have any great expectations if you buy this movie.

Rating:
Summary: Pleasant Film
Review: I quite like this movie. It is a slow-paced drama, but very well acted. This is defeinitely one of those movies you either love or hate.

Rating:
Summary: Cliche drivel
Review: I've watched all the Merchant Ivory productions of note including "A Room With a View", "Howard's End", and "Remains of the Day". Within the first half hour of "Cotton Mary", I couldn't believe the venerable house of Merchant Ivory let this one out the door! The usual subtlety, nuance and visual emotiveness of the actors is missing. Madhur Jaffrey offers an unimaginative performance as an Anglo-Indian stuck in the limbo of two cultures with a history of antagonism and admiration betweem them. Greta Scacchi barely drifts throught the entire movie as a naive and weak-willed wife. There is so much potential in the basic storyline but it is rendered into a soap-opera version of what should have been a poignant and bittersweet story.

For those looking for a more sensitive treatment of the Anglo-Indian dilemma, look for "Jewel in the Crown", a multi-episode Grenada production which appeared in PBS in the late 1980s. It will soon be available on DVD. Don't waste your time with "Cotton Mary".

Rating:
Summary: Cliche drivel
Review: I've watched all the Merchant Ivory productions of note including "A Room With a View", "Howard's End", and "Remains of the Day". Within the first half hour of "Cotton Mary", I couldn't believe the venerable house of Merchant Ivory let this one out the door! The usual subtlety, nuance and visual emotiveness of the actors is missing. Madhur Jaffrey offers an unimaginative performance as an Anglo-Indian stuck in the limbo of two cultures with a history of antagonism and admiration betweem them. Greta Scacchi barely drifts throught the entire movie as a naive and weak-willed wife. There is so much potential in the basic storyline but it is rendered into a soap-opera version of what should have been a poignant and bittersweet story.

For those looking for a more sensitive treatment of the Anglo-Indian dilemma, look for "Jewel in the Crown", a multi-episode Grenada production which appeared in PBS in the late 1980s. It will soon be available on DVD. Don't waste your time with "Cotton Mary".

Rating:
Summary: Cliche drivel
Review: The movie takes place on the Malabar Coast in 1954, years after India gains its independence from Britain. Cotton Mary, a hospital aide and Anglophile takes over the care of a sickly white infant sending it to her wheelchair-bound sister to breastfeed. Mary decides upon herself to take over the English household of the infant's family playing on the mother's fatigue and blindness to what is going on around her (her husband's infidelity, for one thing); pilfering her wares and framing on Abraham, a long time servant to the woman's family; and telling tales of her family to impress the white people who are smug to her stories and the people of color. Her scheme soon becomes too much for her to bear when she confronts the issue of race and class and herself individually. In the end she nearly loses the respect of her family, who believed that they would one day meet the lady of the house.

Rating:
Summary: The remnants of colonialism and its people
Review: The movie takes place on the Malabar Coast in 1954, years after India gains its independence from Britain. Cotton Mary, a hospital aide and Anglophile takes over the care of a sickly white infant sending it to her wheelchair-bound sister to breastfeed. Mary decides upon herself to take over the English household of the infant's family playing on the mother's fatigue and blindness to what is going on around her (her husband's infidelity, for one thing); pilfering her wares and framing on Abraham, a long time servant to the woman's family; and telling tales of her family to impress the white people who are smug to her stories and the people of color. Her scheme soon becomes too much for her to bear when she confronts the issue of race and class and herself individually. In the end she nearly loses the respect of her family, who believed that they would one day meet the lady of the house.

Rating:
Summary: Preposterous story but fine acting and cinematography
Review: This 1999 Merchant-Ivory production is set in India in 1954. A wealthy British woman gives birth to a small baby. As she is not able to breastfeed, the hospital nurse, named Cotton Mary, who proudly proclaims that she is half-English herself, makes the woman dependent upon her and moves into the rich woman's house as a servant. Cotton Mary never tells the mother how she is feeding the baby, but the viewer watches Cotton Mary take the baby in a boat each day to visit her own crippled sister who is a wet nurse and lives in a house which the British refer to as an "alms house", where disabled and aged elderly people live.

The plot is ridiculous. How can a mother show no interest at all in how her baby is being fed? Certainly a tiny baby needs to be fed more than once a day. And certainly, they had baby bottles and formula in 1954. The woman's husband, who is a philandering and uncaring journalist doesn't care either. And their older daughter who is about eight years old keeps the secret of these clandestine feedings.

There's more to the story of course. There are the snobby British colonials and the legacy of colonialism. There is the trusted Indian servant who is forced out of his job because of the lies of Cotton Mary. There is Cotton Mary's niece who has an affair with the husband. But mostly the film is about Cotton Mary herself and her descent into mental illness.

The story is awful but the film still had a few things going for it. One was the great acting job of Madhur Jeffrey cast as Cotton Mary. Another was the setting and excellent photography that transported me to a time and place in India that Merchant-Ivory does so well. But the story itself is preposterous and much too long and boring.

Rating:
Summary: Preposterous story but fine acting and cinematography
Review: This 1999 Merchant-Ivory production is set in India in 1954. A wealthy British woman gives birth to a small baby. As she is not able to breastfeed, the hospital nurse, named Cotton Mary, who proudly proclaims that she is half-English herself, makes the woman dependent upon her and moves into the rich woman's house as a servant. Cotton Mary never tells the mother how she is feeding the baby, but the viewer watches Cotton Mary take the baby in a boat each day to visit her own crippled sister who is a wet nurse and lives in a house which the British refer to as an "alms house", where disabled and aged elderly people live.

The plot is ridiculous. How can a mother show no interest at all in how her baby is being fed? Certainly a tiny baby needs to be fed more than once a day. And certainly, they had baby bottles and formula in 1954. The woman's husband, who is a philandering and uncaring journalist doesn't care either. And their older daughter who is about eight years old keeps the secret of these clandestine feedings.

There's more to the story of course. There are the snobby British colonials and the legacy of colonialism. There is the trusted Indian servant who is forced out of his job because of the lies of Cotton Mary. There is Cotton Mary's niece who has an affair with the husband. But mostly the film is about Cotton Mary herself and her descent into mental illness.

The story is awful but the film still had a few things going for it. One was the great acting job of Madhur Jeffrey cast as Cotton Mary. Another was the setting and excellent photography that transported me to a time and place in India that Merchant-Ivory does so well. But the story itself is preposterous and much too long and boring.