[yasr_overall_rating]
A couple’s relationship is tested when uninvited guests arrive at their home, disrupting their tranquil existence.
Director Darren Aronofsky is not subtle. He will not beat around the bush, if he wants to show you something, believe you me, he will show it to you, uncensored, uncut, and undiminished. What Mr. Aronofsky is probably not aware of, or maybe he is, is that movies need subtle overtones. Sometimes it’s good to hint at something, to give the audience credit for being able to think for themselves and to not have to spell your entire film out for them but with “mother!,” Aronofsky obviously chose to forego that aspect. Even though we see much throughout the movie, it makes me wonder if Mr. Aronofsky deliberately set out to tell a story that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and then tries, very cleverly I might add, to cater to that group of people who like to think of themselves as sophisticated and discriminating and who he knows will call his “masterpiece,” audacious, fearless, even intrepid. But in the end, “mother!” is, quite simply, an exercise in futility.
“mother!” reminds me of Woody Allen’s 2002 comedy, “Hollywood Ending,” where Allen plays Val, an aging film director who the night before he is scheduled to start shooting his latest movie, develops a case of psychosomatic blindness. He hides his ailment from the cast and crew and with the help of a friend, he manages to complete the film. The problem, however, is that the movie is a complete and utter disaster. Camera angles that contradict earlier camera setups and lighting techniques that make no sense whatsoever are incorporated into Val’s “vision” and when it is finally released in the U.S., it flops, but not before becoming a huge success in France, where it is welcomed with open arms by the French major art house film snobs. That is the best way I can sum up “mother!,” not the actual story itself, but the making of the film.
Jennifer Lawrence’s character is simply called Mother, and she lives in a big, beautiful house in the middle of nowhere with her famous but struggling writer husband, played by Javier Bardem (nobody in the movie has a name, they are simply referred to as Mother, Him, Man, Woman, Damsel, Fool, etc). Mother is struggling to decorate the house which we soon discover belonged to her husband and which was burned to the ground in an unfortunate accident. After he managed to rebuild it from the ground up, he began suffering from writer’s block, unable to write a single, solitary word down on paper. As the two get on with their repetitious lives, living day to day inside the houses’ walls, the monotony is broken when a stranger (Ed Harris) turns up on their doorstep. He is a doctor who has just moved into town and informs them that he mistook their house as a bed and breakfast. He is welcomed by Him and given a room to stay in but soon thereafter, his wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) turns up, followed by their two sons. After a fight erupts, and one son badly injures the other, everyone but Mother leaves to go to the hospital.
Mother’s husband eventually returns and during a heated night of passion, she becomes pregnant. When she informs Him of this, he suddenly regains his inspiration and starts writing again. After almost nine months, the book is a huge hit and Mother is setting the dinner table for a quiet evening with her husband when strangers begin turning up on their doorstep. First a handful of admirers, then reporters, and gradually, the house is overrun by complete and utter strangers who begin tearing everything up. People are drawn to Him, wanting to physically touch him because his words have inspired them in different ways but when it is time to have the baby, Mother has to literally pull Him away from them to concentrate on her. After giving birth, she awakens to find the baby gone. She storms into the hallway to see the strangers passing the baby around and as she tries to catch up with them, the baby is accidentally killed, its neck broken. Her husband keeps telling her that she must find a way to forgive them but filled with anger, she douses the place in gasoline and sets the house on fire. And thus, with the remaining remnant of love that Mother still has for Him, he takes that small fragment from her charred body and converts it into a diamond, complete with her slowly dying heartbeat, placing it on a shelf in his bedroom, and the house, and everything inside it, is restored to its original state. The film then goes back to the beginning where we were first introduced to Mother, waking up in her bed, searching for Him, but it is not Jennifer Lawrence, it is a different woman, encompassing her characteristics and physical attributes.
After walking out of the press screening, I was relieved to see that it wasn’t just me who couldn’t make head nor tails out of it. As a movie reviewer, it’s my job to translate the visuals into the written word but sometimes, a film comes along that challenges you and forces you to overcome the complete absurdity and ludicrousness that you witnessed onscreen, and then translate it all onto paper. Aronofsky has never been shy about utilizing religious overtones in his movies and here, he delivers them in spades, even going so far as to show everyone eating the baby’s flesh, their savior.
Asides from the so-called plot, if you even want to call it that, the biggest issue that annoyed me the most, was Lawrence’s character. In most of her other roles, she plays strong, tenacious women, whether it is Aurora Lane in “Passengers,” Mystique in the “X-Men” films, or Katniss Everdeen in “The Hunger Games,” she is always the driving force of the story but here, she is so characterless and feeble, unable to make up her mind about the most simple of tasks, you just want to reach into the screen and hand her a crossbow and hope she’ll snap out of her trance. In the end, “mother!” is the ramblings of a filmmaker who is obviously suffering from a midlife crisis with nowhere to turn. Here’s hoping his next outing will be a return to form. Well, for Aronofsky at least.
In theaters Friday, September 15th
