Scott Amundsen It takes guts to adapt a stage play to the screen without "opening it up;" most of the time such efforts either feel confining or, if opened up, the power of the original gets lost in the screenplay."'night, Mother", adapted to the screen by the original playwright Marsha Norman, is a courageous, nearly heroic effort: Norman does not allow the action to move outside the small house shared by Thelma Cates (Anne Bancroft) and her daughter Jessie (Sissy Spacek) and the result is a harrowing look at two unhappy women and the different solutions they find for their unhappiness.Jessie, a middle-aged epileptic who can neither hold down a job or even drive a car, whose husband has left her and whose son is a petty criminal, has decided on her "final solution:" suicide, with her late father's pistol.The film opens with Jessie puttering around the house and we see that she has a list of things to do before taking her leave. The camera follows Spacek around the house as she does laundry, cleans out the refrigerator and some of the kitchen cabinets, occasionally glancing at her list and crossing an item off.Enter Thelma, home from some kind of shopping trip. The dialogue between them is completely ordinary until Thelma sees Jessie cleaning her father's pistol and, after some verbal fencing, Jessie tells Thelma of her plan to be dead by morning.Thus the stage is set for a tug-of-war for Jessie's soul, with Mama on one side and Jessie herself on the other. Thelma becomes increasingly desperate as she realizes her daughter has made up her mind, and the film builds to a shattering climax.The original Broadway cast was Kathy Bates as Jessie and Anne Pitoniak as Thelma. It's a little unfortunate that they didn't bring them to the screen: Spacek and Bancroft are both excellent but they don't always seem to be related. Spacek is real while Bancroft is theatrical and they don't always appear to be on the same page dramatically. But this is a small quibble about an otherwise superb film that ultimately breaks the heart.

moonspinner55 Tough, unyielding screen-version of Marsha Norman's play which can hold a lot of interest for select viewers, the theme of suicide being an uncomfortable one for the mass-market. Director Tom Moore doesn't try to disguise the stage origins of the material but, because of his mundane, straightforward handling, the piece doesn't grip the viewer the way live actors on the stage can. It has also been handicapped by the casting, with Anne Bancroft and Sissy Spacek portraying mother and daughter. They're marvelous actresses--and both are fine in this movie--but I never felt they were related (Kathy Bates played the daughter on stage, but was probably too old to be cast alongside Bancroft). Because she always does wonders with roles of conflicted young women, it is Spacek who comes off as the stronger of the two; she really nails the part of this hapless, yet coldly focused and determined girl who wants to kill herself. Bancroft has a tendency to overdo certain scenes; she's theatrical instead of logical. The script really needed to be reworked for the screen (and for these particular ladies) and the daughter doesn't give us much of a chance to catch up to her emotionally, and so many viewers may feel shut out of the proceedings early on. **1/2 from ****

gftbiloxi Written for the stage by Marsha Norman, 'NIGHT, MOTHER opened on Broadway in 1983 with Anne Pitoniak and Kathy Bates in the roles of Thelma and Jessie Cates. It proved a stunning success with critics and audiences alike, running 380 performances, receiving the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a Tony award for Best Play, and Tony nominations for Pitoniak, Bates, and director Tom Moore.In 1986 Marsha Norman herself adapted the play to film. The roles of Thelma and Jessie went to Anne Bancroft and Sissy Spacek, and in the process of writing--and possibly under pressure from producers--Norman expanded the original play to include characters mentioned but never seen. The result was something slightly less than ideal. Spacek is perfectly cast as the suicidal Jessie, but although she gives an excellent performance Bancroft is intrinsically miscast in the role of Jessie's "plain country woman" mother. The expansion of the original story also has the effect of diluting the claustrophobic intensity of the original. As for director Tom Moore, although his work for the play was memorable, his work with the film was unremarkable.But unexpectedly, such is the power of the story's basic premise that these flaws hardly matter. Watered down, fiddled with, and somewhat miscast, 'NIGHT, MOTHER is still a knock-you-flat story that raises the sort of questions that keep you awake on a sleepless night. Thelma is an ordinary, uneducated woman who takes life as it comes; Jessie, however, is an uneasy mixture of introspection and uncertainty, a woman whose marriage failed when she developed epilepsy, whose son has become a bit of gutter trash, who has over the years become a recluse in her mother's home. She's tired of the whole thing, and on this particular evening she informs her mother that in a few hours she's going to shoot herself and put an end to it.Like the play, the film is essentially an emotional explosion between the two women, Jessie spelling out her reasons for her suicide, Thelma working to turn Jessie from it. Although the suspense of the film arises from a "Will she do it or not?" situation, the real interest here is in Jessie's motivations, the how and why of her decision, and the tactics that Thelma uses in an effort to bring Jessie's plans to a grinding halt, and the way they battle each other over the course of the film. The interest is in the characters, plain and simple.As noted, Bancroft is not ideally cast here. It is extremely difficult to accept her in the role of Thelma Cates. Even so, Bancroft gives it all she has--and the end result is quite powerful as acting pure and simple, a remarkable feat. But the real powerhouse here is Spacek: we believe her, never question her in the role, and buy into it from start to finish. Even with Bancroft's miscasting, the dilution of the play, and the uninspired direction, Spacek's performance is more than enough to render the film powerful, memorable.This is not a film that I casually recommend. It rather depends on the viewer's life experiences, and I would hardly send it off to a person in a depressed state of mind or one who had a suicide in the family. But it is worth the trouble it takes to seek out, particularly if it leads you on to reading the play itself--or better yet, seeing a stage production of the same.GFT, Amazon Reviewer

Rosemary (zelda1964) What I gather from this film,was that Thelma(Bancroft)was blind to the pain and hurt Jessie(Spacek) felt within.There was nothing she could do to rectify the situation. The self-pitying Jessie was bent on suicide, and she had reason to believe the World was never going to change.It seemed that she was punishing herself, and felt responsible for the way her Life and Family turned out.I believe that Thelma tried to be a good mother. She did not want epilepsy to be a hindrance to young Jessie's fun and social atmosphere.Wouldn't any parent try to make her child blend in and fit with the rest of the crowd? The movie keeps the viewer on the edge; You wonder how low a person can go before he sees a "light" and gets back up again.