| Andre's Mother | |
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DVD cover |
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| Directed by | Deborah Reinisch |
| Produced by | Sarah Green Deborah Reinisch |
| Written by | Terrence McNally |
| Starring | Richard Thomas Sada Thompson Sylvia Sidney |
| Music by | Jonathan Sheffer |
| Cinematography | Bobby Bukowski |
| Editing by | Jeffrey Wolf |
| Distributed by | Public Broadcasting Service |
| Release date(s) | March 7, 1990 |
| Running time | 50 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Andre's Mother is a 1990 American drama film directed by Deborah Reinisch. The screenplay by Terrence McNally is an expansion of an eight-minute play written for an anthology called Urban Blight that was produced by the Manhattan Theater Club in 1988.[1]
The film was produced by WGBH Boston and was broadcast on March 7, 1990 by PBS stations nationwide as part of the American Playhouse series. It was released on Region 1 DVD on April 25, 2006.
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Set at the Manhattan memorial service for Andre Gerard, who died of AIDS and was buried in Dallas several weeks earlier, the story focuses on his mother Katherine's inability to come to terms with his death or share her grief with Cal, the young man's lover. Her rage is directed not only at the man she never accepted and her own mother, who was less judgmental of her grandson's life, but at Andre himself as well.
John O'Connor of the New York Times called it one of those "programs that vividly illustrate why public television can be indispensable ... Andre's Mother has been given a superb cast and an exquisite production ... Even in this sensitive exercise, obviously, the subject of AIDS is handled with some trepidation. Andre cannot be just an average guy; he has to be a paragon ... But the AIDS epidemic is claiming ordinary and exceptionally gifted citizens alike. Perhaps they can all merit television's unselfconscious compassion some day. Meanwhile, bolstered powerfully by the performances of Miss Thompson and Mr. Thomas, Andre's Way makes encouraging headway in the right direction."[1]
McNally won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries, Movie or a Dramatic Special, and the National Board of Review named it Outstanding Television Movie of the Year.