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USA 2017
Directed by
Darren Aronofsky
121 minutes
Rated MA

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
3 stars

Mother!

Synopsis: The uncomplicated lives of a poet, Eli (Javier Bardem), and his wife, Grace (Jennifer Lawrence), who live in an isolated country house, are disturbed when an unknown couple (Ed Harris and Michelle Pfieffer) arrive on their doorstep.

Many people will wonder what the exclamation mark in Mother! is for.  Having seen the film they are likely to think that it is shorthand for a well-known expletive and that writer-director Darren Aronofsky  could have as easily have called it WTF! for whilst there is no doubt that the film is audacious in conception and execution what it wants to say is another matter.

The film is divided into roughly two halves, the first a kind of bad dream, the second, a full-on nightmare. In the first half, Grace, who is largely patronized by her self-preoccupied, older husband, becomes increasingly disturbed as he seems to be falling under the spell of the uninvited guests and the peaceful home they have together starts falling apart at the seams (a metaphor which will acquire real meaning in the second half of the film). Her growing discomfort culminates with a dead body, a houseful of complete strangers and weird goings-on in the basement.  Eventually the guests leave, never to be seen again. 

The second half of the film, which is set nine months later, essentially repeats this progression but escalates it to apocalyptic proportions before looping back to the film’s ironically innocuous opening line “Baby?” In between these two utterances Aronofsky gives us  a psychological thriller-horror story with a kind of Stephen King via Roman Polanski and Stanley Kubrick unhinged vibe topped with a millenarianist vision of the end of days peppered with the kind of mystico-religious allusions we have seen in his previous films, The Fountain (2006) and Noah (2014) along with the psychological and emotional disintegrations of Black Swan (2010) and Requiem For A Dream (2000).

With Aronofsky’s well-founded reputation as a modern American master of art cinema and its A-list cast Mother! will have its eager champions but is it really anything more than a bravura mash-up of the director’s over-heated psyche? It is fairly clear by the quarter time mark that Mother! is not meant to be taken realistically but it also unclear how it is to be taken. The end credits with its large roster of characters such as “Soldier”, “Whoremonger” “Penitent” and “Healer” suggest that the film is intended as some kind of allegorical tale but if so it has no purchase within the narrative itself.  It might be Grace’s paranoid fantasy à la The Tenant (1976) or Eli’s breakdown à la The Shining (1980) or it might simply be Aronofsky’s hyperbolically extended metaphor for the endless cycle of birth and death, creation and destruction which is the chaos of life as such. I lean towards the latter interpretation but perhaps only because it is the easiest.

Aside from the over-arching question of its meaning there are other aspects of the film that you’ve got to wonder about.  Matthew Libatique’s  hand-held camera stays very close to the action which means that much of the time Jennifer Lawrence’s head, either from the front or, more commonly, seen from behind, fills one third of the screen. As Libatique often uses low, chiaroscuro lighting and the film is very busy with the characters constantly on the move the result is visually tiring.

In what is effectively the main role Lawrence’s Botticellian face is often in close-up (sometimes her eyes completely fill the screen), its peach-like glow in marked contrast to Bardem, Harris and Pfieffer’s age-worn features. It is perhaps too obviously symbolic of her innocence but Lawrence is called upon to do more than simply be a sacrificial lamb and she does it with striking physical vigour.  Harris and Pfieffer do a good double act but Bardem I found less well-suited to his part, embodying too much the Latin alpha male to convince as a man of letters.  As for the casting of Kristen Wiig as Eli’s publisher and in the allegorical persona of “Herald”, that was just plain wrong.  Why not Seth Rogen? He’d have been just right for the role of “Fool”.

Mother! is an intense experience and certainly not to be dismissed on one viewing but it is very much for the Aronofsky faithful than the casual film-goer.

 

 

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