The music of Flora and Son is scattered throughout the production, but the film is not a musical with choreographed set pieces but is instead there to drive the characters’ motivations. A young mum and a wayward son try to find common ground through music. With a limited theatrical release, this slice-of-life comedy-drama was written and directed by John Carney.
The R Rating comes from the use of language throughout the movie. In the UK and Ireland, we don’t seem too bothered by the barrage of verbal atrocities spewing from the characters’ mouths, as it only garners a fifteen rating here. However, it does manage to pull an R from the U.S. censors. There are also some drug references and some sex references that also push the rating to where it lands.
There must have been an opportunity to lighten up on those aspects, but to stay honest to the characters and the setting, Carney makes the right decision to at least be honest enough to allow his flawed creations to behave the way we know they would.
Age Rating R Guide
R stands for Restricted. In the U.S., an R-rated film means that people under seventeen must have a parent or guardian with them at the screening. It also means that the film will probably have strong language, adult themes, adult activities, persistent and probably gratuitous violence, nudity, and sex.
Some will have all of the above.
Parents are often urged not to take younger children into an R-rated movie, although technically, they probably could. In the U.S., this rating is just one under the NC-17 rating, which stipulates that nobody under the age of seventeen will be admitted. In the UK, the equivalent rating is 18, the same as the US NC-17 but a year up.
These ratings were formally what the industry would call an X certificate.
Flora and Son’s Plot Explained
Young mother Flora struggles with her son Max. Fourteen-year-old Max dreams of being a rapper but slowly slides off the tracks and takes it out on his hapless mother. They are somewhat rudderless, butting heads with each other, and generally miserable. Flora gives Max a discarded guitar, which he gifts to him on his birthday.
It goes as well as you think it would, but after a few drinks, Flora decides to sign up for an online guitar lesson with Jeff, an L.A. resident probably struggling with his day-to-day. Writing a love song together, the various versions peppered throughout the screenplay form a spine for the story, and Carney’s characters slowly evolve and head toward the third act.
Carney is a native of Ireland, so he uses what he knows best in this flick, setting it firmly in the working-class center of the country.
If you are familiar with Carney’s work, you will know his method of making a film a musical when it is not one.
With a believable and ground-level cast, Flora and Son has the kind of heart you would expect from the writer and director. It also includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the online guitar tutor Jeff, who finds himself with the enviable task of teaching Flora how to play.
The film is an endearing look at the relationship between a young mother and her son and their struggle against each other as they try to make their way through life. It sounds heartwarming, doesn’t it? So why does the film have an R rating in the US and a 15 in the UK?
