Mary and Martha (film)
After her young son and only child, George (Lux Haney-Jardine), is bullied by classmates, she decides to pull him out of school and take him on an extended trip to Africa because she feels she can give him a better education.In the midst of grieving, Mary decides to return to Africa after George's funeral where she meets Martha, a British woman whose grown son, Ben (Sam Claflin),[2] has also just died of the same disease while working at an orphanage in Mozambique.In the process, Mary and Martha come to realise that the losses experienced by two comfortable white Western households are atypical, and that the real impact of malaria is on parts of the world that few people in their circles know or care about.Brian Lowry from Variety felt that "Mary and Martha harks back to when the service was content to tell great little stories – often with an agenda – that might not have been commercial enough to find a home elsewhere [...] Admittedly, Curtis has a rather facile view of how good can be accomplished, but in a cynical age, there's something refreshing about old-fashioned idealism, even if the movie hinges on well-intentioned Westerners bringing relief to the Third World.Screenwriter Richard Curtis and director Phillip Noyce do their best to, in the words of Hilary Swank's Mary, "tell you how it feels to have a personal involvement with malaria."