A retired family lawyer is forced to abandon his dream holiday and reluctantly re-unite his estranged children to honour his mother’s dying wish.
All Lenny Rubins (Timothy Spall, “Harry Potter”, “Enchanted”, “Sweeney Todd”) ever wanted was to cruise... cruise the world in style, but a lifetime as a hard working family lawyer and a devoted husband and father meant he never had the time... until now. With his beloved wife sadly long deceased, his not so beloved mother conveniently stored away in an old age home, his four grown up children flown the nest, and having taken an early retirement Lenny’s finally free to set sail. But as he boards the luxurious 5 star cruise ship for the holiday of a lifetime he’s hit with terrible news... it’s his mother Sara Rubins (Honor Blackman, “Goldfinger”, “The Avengers”). With his luggage in tow, Lenny rushes off to the hospital.
False alarm! A suspected heart attack turns out to be nothing more than a bout of angina. With Lenny desperately trying to rejoin his cruise his mother has different plans. Much to Lenny’s dismay Sara’s bought the old family house with the retirement fund that he had set up for her. And why? To re-unite Lenny’s four estranged children. Having lost all her family there is nothing in the world she would like more than to see her grandchildren re-united and does not want to have to wait for it to happen, literally, over her dead body. Lenny wants none of it but his continued protests leads Sara to have a real life heart attack. Back to the hospital!
However difficult Lenny finds his mother he can’t face seeing her pass away with her last dying wish unfulfilled. But re-unite the children! World peace would be easier. With mother’s pulling at his heart strings her charms prove to be too hard for Lenny to resist. There goes the dream cruise.
So let’s meet the children: The oldest Bernice 34 (Rhona Mitra, “Underworld 3”, “Nip/Tuck” “Sweet Home Alabama”) an eco-warrior “the-world’s-against-me/people-are-harldy-worth-it-let’s-save-the-planet-for–the-animals-sake” campaigner working out in Africa; Danny 33 (James Callis, “Battlestar Galactica”, “Bridget Jones”) is a divorced “capitalist-loving/survival-of-the-fittest/ control-freak-with-a-rod-up-where-the-sun-don’t shine” high-flying city exec with no time for his seven year old son; next in line, formerly known as Charlie but now insistent on being called by his Buddhist commune name is ‘Clarity’ (29); and finally Jonathon Rubins, the baby of the family, aka Rabbi Yona (26).
Contacting them all is an adventure in itself. Lenny travels to a remote Buddhist Monastery and a pygmy Congolese forest enclave. Persuading them to come is one thing, keeping them together, another! Re-unite the children! What was mother thinking? World peace would have been easier. As Lenny miraculously succeeds in bringing the family together childish rivalries and very real conflicts come to the fore as an over achieving collection of siblings struggle with being one of a collective. This is all a far cry from how Lenny had envisaged starting his retirement.
What lies ahead is an uplifting feel good comedy drama about the struggles of maintaining the family unity in the face of an ever increasingly challenging world.
