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Saturday September 16, 2017
Movie Review: Mother! (2017)
WARNING: SPOILERS
Wouldn’t it have been cheaper for Darren Aronofsky to see a shrink?
The acclaimed writer-director (“Requiem for a Dream,” “Black Swan”) has often dealt in dreamscapes, and nightmarish scenarios, but “Mother!” is like listening to a friend describe a dream to you. For two fucking hours.
Yes, there are glimmers of meaning. It’s a metaphor for Christianity, or America, or creativity mostly.
Mother (Jennifer Lawrence) creates, or recreates, the beautiful home where her poet-husband (Javier Bardem) writes his poetry. Except he’s writing nothing. He’s blocked. It’s all too perfect. He can't breathe. So he invites people in and ruins their home and their love and their life. Or her life anyway. He needs the love and structure, but he also needs something else—stories and chaos, fights and death and anarchy—to create.
Remember “New York Stories” from 1989? Three short films from Francis Coppola, Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese? My favorite was always the Scorsese one, “Life Lessons,” written by Richard Price, in which Nick Nolte plays a painter who is living with his assistant/former lover Paulette (Rosanna Arquette), who seems to be using him. She’s living off him and giving nothing back; she’s sleeping around; she’s making him insanely jealous. Finally she leaves. And in the art exhibition of the works he created while insanely jealous, he meets another pretty young thing and takes her home; and you realize it was he who was using her; in order to create.
Like that. Except in a horror movie five times as long.
Life lessons
Mother doesn’t want anyone in the home. She seems to have a symbiotic relationship with the home. She feels its heartbeat.
But hubby keeps inviting people in. First, it’s Ed Harris, a doctor at the nearby university, who’s looking for a place to stay. Initially he seems nervous, cautious. Then he’s just an asshole. Against her wishes, he smokes in the house, he drinks too much, he gets sick, he monopolizes hubby’s time. Hubby cares way too much for him.
Then the wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) arrives and she’s even worse: drinking midday, making a mess of the kitchen, and the laundry room, and the toilet.
Then their kids arrive (Brian and Domhnall Gleeson), and they’re fighting over who gets what from dad, who’s dying, and one thing leads to another, and, just like in the Book of Genesis, one brother (Domhnall) kills the other (Brian). Mother is left behind to mop up the blood. But she can’t get it all. And when she fiddles with it, poking at the floorboard, part of that floorboard gives way; and it’s like the blood is acid, seeping through to the basement to the furnace, where bad vibes await.
It was here, J-Law alone in the basement, when the movie was scariest for me.
It was also here, particularly with a few lines from Ed Harris or Michelle Pfeiffer (“We said we’re sorry”), or Javier Bardem (about inviting the parents back with some family and friends for a wake for the dead son), that the movie was funniest to me. But the wake becomes a party, almost a 70s-era party, and people aren’t treating the house correctly, and J-Law stumbles room to room, until things get so bad that she finally kicks everyone out. Then she and hubby argue, then make love, then she wakes up pregnant. And he suddenly has inspiration again. He’s writing.
Eight+ months later, ballooned out, she’s preparing an elaborate dinner for two when, uh oh, fans staring appearing at their door. And he loves it. And this is where it gets really, really weird. For a moment it seems like a metaphor for America. On one side there’s the violence of the fans, or the anarchists, or ... something; on the other it’s the violence of the forces of law and order. The house becomes a battle ground. For a long, fucking time.
And this is exactly where I began to get really, really bored. Before, I was absorbing Mother’s tensions, her anal fixations, which are mine: Don’t sit on the counter; don’t fuck up the house. But once the crazy shit goes down, and she’s just trying to escape the house, well, this tension is gone. And now it’s just silly. Now we’re 90 minutes into Darren Aronofsky telling us his dream from the night before.
Finally she gives birth upstairs. Hubby wants to hold it, but she doesn’t want him to. So he just stands there, with his long Javier Bardem face. (He reminded me of the Grinch a bit here, just as, earlier, Ed and Michelle reminded me of Thing 1 and Thing 2.) But eventually sleep overtakes her, and when she wakes up ... no baby. He’s showing it to the crowd. Then he’s giving it to the crowd. Then its blanket is taken and it’s naked. Then it stops making a noise. Then it’s dead. She looks around and sees they’re all eating it.
So Christian metaphor, right? Or metaphor for creativity? Or both?
I like it when she goes ballistic and starts slicing people. I liked it less when the crowd begins to punch her in the face and tear at her dress and show her tits. Why did Darren have to go there? In the end, she blows up the joint. She works her way into the basement and sets it afire with Ed Harris’ lighter that she hid in the first act. A lighter in the first act goes off in the third.
Aronofsky’s complaint
Oh, right. The big jewel.
There was also a big diamond-like jewel that hubby kept in his office, and which he says is the only thing that survived the fire that destroyed his family home when he was younger. And she, J-Law, helped put it together. But Ed and Michelle broke it.
Well, in the aftermath of the latest fire, which he survives and she doesn’t, he reaches into Mother’s chest and removes her heart; then he smooshes it in his hands like Superman with a piece of coal; and, just like Superman with a piece of coal, we get the big jewel again. And then, as in the beginning, the burnt hull of the house is remade, redone, swoosh, with CGI, as we make our way from room to room and then upstairs to a pretty young thing waking up and wondering about her husband. Except this time it’s not J Law; it’s another pretty young thing; it’s his new wife. And the cycle starts anew.
Get it? Get it? Get it? Get it? Get it? Get it?
So [said the doctor]. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?