Has HBO gotten back into the do-gooder movie game?
Tonight’s original movie, “Mary And Martha” is not, as you might expect from its title, a biblical story, although the two lead female characters are saintly enough to fill a gospel or two.
Mary and Martha are actually two fictional characters from the keyboard of Richard Curtis, who wrote one of my all-time favorite movies, “Love Actually.”
Mary (Hilary Swank) is a wealthy Virginia wife, mother and decorator who — like those annoying mothers who write how-to parenting books when their kids are still too young to know how they’ll turn out — is a know-it-all mom.
When she hears at yoga class that her son, George (Lux Haney-Jardine) is being bullied at school, she decides she will pull him out of school and take him to South Africa for six months — where he’ll be home-schooled and they’ll have a great adventure.
Great and overbearing mom that she is, one quick call to the pediatrician is all she does in terms of immunizations, convinced that neither she or George need shots or anti-malaria medications. First of all, if you travel to any part of Africa, you need to visit a doctor who specializes in travel vaccinations, get immunized and are advised strongly to take anti-malaria medications.
That’s a huge hole in the story and, of course, after a few months George gets malaria and dies. Back home, overcome with grief, Mary tells her ever-patient husband (Frank Grillo) that she needs to return to Africa to mourn.
In Mozambique, she just happens to bump into Martha (Brenda Blethyn), an English housewife, whose grown son taught there and also succumbed to malaria. Why Mary doesn’t recognize the dead son’s picture is beyond me, since George played soccer with Martha’s son’s class.
Anyway, united by their grief, the women eventually come to realize that their sons’ lives wouldn’t be wasted if they could make a difference — so they bring the malaria cause to the Senate where, with the help of Mary’s estranged politician father (James Woods), they let the world know what is happening in Africa.
Did you know for example, that twice the number of children die from malaria each year than all the people who have been killed in every war around the world since 1967? It’s an astounding and tragic number this movie serves to bring home.
While Swank and Blethyn make everything they’re in more remarkable for their presence, the movie plays more like a based-on-fact Lifetime flick than an HBO work of fiction.
But as Mary says to her husband, if it saves one life, it’s more-than-worth it.