LIFE'S A BREEZE

Despite the title, life hardly seems like a breeze for three generations of this Irish family who live hand to mouth in a Dublin suburb.  The matriarch Nan is a bit of a hoarder so the rest of the family devise a plan to get her out of her House one day so that they can give it a surprise makeover as her 80th birthday gift. Out go 20 years of newspapers, stacks of discarded novels and piles of unworn clothes making the whole house looking un-cluttered for the first time ever.

They even splash out for a new bed but instead of being pleased that she no longer has to sleep on her old lumpy mattress Nan goes white as a sheet and demands to know where they dumped the old one. She claims that not only does it hold her life savings but that she has managed to stash away the unlikely sum of 1 million euros in it.

At first her three adult children, all of whom are unemployed, refuse to believe that she could have possibly accumulated so much, but knowing that this is their inheritance anyway they start to hunt the discarded mattress down.  The search takes them to recycling dumps and landfill sites across the whole region but  once word leaks out about their quest and is splashed across newspaper headlines, it turns into a major national treasure hunt with total strangers looking for this lost jackpot.

This very implausible story based on a similar real event in Israel ends up making a delightful bittersweet comedy about how the idea of a potential fortune changes people completely.  The wonderful veteran Irish actress Fionnula Flanagan plays Nan so beautifully, shrewdly keeping her cards close to her chest as her ham-fisted family muddle their way through the search, and through life in general. She bonds much more with her 12 year old grandchild Emma (superbly played by newcomer Kelly Thornton) who is the only one who even attempts to understand and respect this old lady for who she really is.

This easygoing feel good movie has all the warmth and humor that you come to expect from an Irish comedy and so much more.  Great fun.

★★★★★★★