Jacob's Ladder (2019 remake)

 

Jacob’s Ladder (remake) (2019)

Dir. David M. Rosenthal

Written by Jeff Buhler, Sarah Thorpe, “story by” Jake Wade Wall, Jeff Buhler, based on a screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin

Starring Michael Ealy, Jesse Williams, Nicole Beharie

 

 

Since the original JACOB'S LADDER is one of my very favorite horror movies of all time, I can't say I approached this (loose) remake with a lot of optimism; more like morbid curiosity. Unfortunately it doesn't even offer much to be morbidly curious about. It's not bad so much as it fails to ever be even a little good, and the ways in which it fails to be good are mostly pretty boring. It's rarely outright incompetent, but at the same time there's just no evidence whatsoever that anybody involved wanted to be here or had any clear idea why it would be worth telling this story other than to ride the coattails of a more famous movie which still isn't even that famous.

 

That is, anyway, the only reason I can think of that this would be called JACOB’s LADDER. It vaguely echoes some plot elements of the original –the titular Jacob (Michael Ealy, MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA) is an American soldier back home after a foreign war (Afghanistan rather than Vietnam) and gets mixed up with an experimental drug that leads him into a paranoid, hallucinatory journey. Similar enough that you’d probably notice, but not specific enough that they’d have to worry about lawsuits if they just ripped it off. But let’s be honest here, it’s not like someone came up with a brilliant story and just later realized it kind of superficially resembled the scenario for a cult flick from 1990. Obviously somebody picked up the rights to the remake, grabbed some gigging writer (Jeff Buhler, already responsible for THE GRUDGE REMAKE [2020] and PET SEMETARY REMAKE and the screenplay for MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN and THE PRODIGY and recently STUDIO 666) and said “write a story we can title JACOB’S LADDER so that a small percentage of people will watch it thinking it’s the good version, and a handful of horror die-hards will check it out due to a sense of morbid curiosity.” And then when they needed re-writes and the original guy didn’t want to bother, they handed it to a personal trainer or niece or somebody that the producer knew (Sarah Thorpe, no other credits) and just said “try and cut out the stuff that sounds expensive.”

 

This is not the type of scenario that one could reasonably expect to produce great art. But it could still probably be better than this. Mostly the movie as a whole is just sort of drab and pointless, but I guess the script is maybe weak enough to qualify as outright bad, although in a bland way rather than an exotic one. The story itself is built around a pretty tepid mindfuck (and pretty nonsensical should you be inclined to try and ask pissy questions like "wait, if that's what was happening, what have I been watching up til now?") though at least it's a different mindfuck than the original. (I said "different," not "better" although I'll readily admit that the twist in the original is the worst thing about it). The fact that it's very stupid is a problem for a movie this relentlessly dour, but the bigger problem is more fundamental: it fails to ever establish a convincing baseline reality --starting with Jacob and his wife’s (Nicole Beharie, SHAME) pristine, antiseptic home with its demure, compliant newborn (!) who cries exactly once and never while anyone is sleeping-- which renders its later attempts at surrealism a dismal nonstarter. Can't disrupt reality if I never for one second believe in these characters even at their status quo.

 

And it doesn't get more convincing as the situation escalates. Early on, Jacob watches as his brother Isaac (Jesse Williams, CABIN IN THE WOODS --yes, their names are Jacob and Isaac) dies in front of him. Years later, Isaac turns up alive, apparently within walking distance of Jacob's house! And Jacob's response is... mild surprise and annoyance? He basically just drops him off at his house and goes about his business. At no point does he or his wife freak out or seem to find this shocking and inexplicable and demanding of answers. He mumbles something that the paperwork must have gotten mixed up and that's that. And Ealy (who I consider to be a terrific actor, but obviously needed a little more direction here) doesn't help matters with his disappointingly tepid performance. Very quickly, this guy is experiencing totally insane shit, and his reaction never seems to rise above "mildly perturbed." I'm sorry, but putting a five-o'clock shadow on Michael Ealy does not make him look tormented, it just makes him look hotter. And he's already borderline too hot to take seriously in the first place.

 

So yeah, it's a bad script, but it's at least committed to its dumb twist, and could, maybe, have been salvaged by some real directorial flair. But if any director was going to be able to pull that off, David M. Rosenthal --who must be a real charming guy, considering how often in his career he's been able to pull amazingly overqualified casts for completely anonymous DTV genre fare-- ain't the one to do it. The original JACOB'S LADDER is a masterclass in gritty, nightmare-fueled paranoia; this has a perfunctory sort of visual slickness that makes it feel like a gloomy car commercial, and the best it can manage in the nightmare department is that lame thing where someone's face will suddenly distort into a SCREAM mask and they’ll shout "boo!" (a trick I was already mocking as shamelessly unimaginative back when DEAD BIRDS did it like a thousand years ago). Creating a paranoid thriller is all about using the tools of cinema to create a heightened, anxious mental state, and this is just utterly, woefully unable to do it, instead drifting between hacky jump-scare scenes and languid, clunky backstory which is so rigidly built to service the goofy twist that the movie can barely even pretend to be a straight horror movie. Its problem isn't really that it's a lunkheaded cash-in trading on the good name of a classic; it's that it's just kind of boring.

 

Props for the scene near the end where he has sex with the Angel of Death, though. If the whole thing were that eccentric and melodramatic, we might actually have something here.

Color Out Of Space

Color Out Of Space (2019)

Dr. Richard Stanley

Written by Richard Stanley, Scarlett Amaris, based on "The Colour Out of Space" by H. P. Lovecraft

Starring Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, Madeleine Arthur, Brendan Meyer

I was dreading this one just as much as I was looking forward to it, which is always the way I approach a career resurgence by an artist like director Richard Stanley, i.e. an ambitious wunderkind who produced two good-bordering-on-great early works and then dramatically vanished from the scene. That’s about as surefire a recipe to end up over rated as has yet been conceived by man. Nothing drives up an artist’s stock like unavailability; it’s how Jeff Buckley went from being a guy who made a decent folk album to a legendary romantic genius, or how LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT went from a critically panned matinee flick to the holy grail of lost cinema. Rarely does such a sudden and lengthy departure from the artistic scene reverse itself,* but that is precisely what Stanley has managed, by seizing on his unexpected reemergence in the cultural zeitgeist (brought about by the 2014 release of the documentary LOST SOUL, which depicts Stanley’s disastrous attempt to make THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU back in 1996) to mount a comeback. And so it is that Richard Stanley returns from the elite ranks of artists whose legendary status was largely built on unrealized potential, to the more Earthy realm of artists who have to justify their hype by, you know, actually making art.

That’s a dangerous thing for an artist who has quietly built a rather enviable reputation largely around the promise of unrealized projects, which will always remain perfect and pristine, safely locked away in our imaginations. There are any number of ways this can disappoint you. You can discover that, after all this time, the promising young artist was just that – promising, not fully formed, all hype and no delivery. You can discover that the promising young artist really did have something once, but lost it somewhere along the way – lost the fire of youth, lost the touch, just lost interest. Or, even worse, you can discover that the promise was legitimate and the talent is still there, but the time has passed, and something that would have seemed boundary-pushing and exciting in the artist’s heyday now feels dated and played-out. I must admit that I absolutely assumed Stanley’s return to directing** was more likely to fall into one of those many pitfalls than it was to represent a triumphant return to a long-denied cinematic wunderkind.

 Actually neither turns out to be the case, but I'm surprised and happy to report that it's closer to the latter than the former. COLOR OUT OF SPACE*** is not a great movie, but it is quite a good one, demonstrating some real moxie and craftsmanship which mark it as the undeniable work of someone with some real talent, even if a few missteps are made along the way. And frankly that shocked the hell out of me. I was all but certain that three decades in the cold would have left Stanley diminished and rusty if not out-and-out broken, and that’s even that takes for granted his two early-90s successes weren’t a fluke to begin with. I was expecting a latter-day Argento-style disappointment, but COLOR OUT OF SPACE reveals a director as ambitious and gifted as he's ever been. Which is not to say it's a work of untouchable genius or anything, but his two 90's movies were the work of a genre director with real promise. Thirty years later, he's still promising. That's better than I thought I could reasonably hope for.

As the 500 word of preamble make obvious, then, this movie comes with some baggage by virtue of its director, and that's before we even add the extra weight of its star (one-time Oscar winner and beloved internet meme Nic Cage, deep in his direct-to-video rampage) and its source material (H.P. “The Sauce” Lovecraft's genre-defining classic short story of the same title). It buckles under all that weight, of course –it’s hard to imagine any movie that wouldn’t-- but manages to keep from ever completely collapsing, and that in itself is kind of an accomplishment. As a Stanley comeback, it proves he was worthy of our interest, if not our hyperbole. As a Lovecraft adaptation, it's astonishingly good, although in a large part by virtue of the miserable company that descriptor places it in. As a Nic Cage movie... well, that's a little more up for debate, but at least he’s always gonna give you your money’s worth.

Before we get to that, though, we might as well talk about the actual plot. Amazingly, though the story is updated to the present day, this turns out to be a broadly faithful riff on the original Lovecraft story, which recounts the tale of the rural Gardner family, whose lives are thrown into escalating madness by the arrival of a meteor which brings with it an “unknown color” that gradually subverts and distorts the environment, and the bodies and minds of the people in it. You know Stanley really gets Lovecraft because he mimics the author’s characteristic style of writing a story-within-a-story (the original is actually a story-within-a-story-within-a-story, the gripping saga of a guy who interviews another guy about a third guy, but Stanley is content with merely one framing device). The details vary, especially as the movie progresses and gradually pivots towards Cronenbergian body horror, but the essence of the original story is clearly still here, along with most of the major incidents. It is, I would hesitate to say, one of the most faithful Lovecraft adaptations I’ve ever seen, not that it has a great deal of competition in that regard.

Of course, Lovecraft adaptations, even generally faithful ones, are practically preordained to be garbage. But COLOR OUT OF SPACE draws its unusual strength from its atmosphere, cultivated with great care by Stanley, DOP Steve Annis (a music video guy til 2019's I AM MOTHER), production designer Katie Byron (BOOKSMART, FINAL GIRLS) and composer Colin Stetson (HEREDITARY). It adds up to a look and feel which neatly captures Lovecraft's sense of creeping, insinuating wrongness. This is absolutely essential to any prayer of meaningful adapting Lovecraft, and it’s the one thing that virtually every other film version of his work fumbles miserably (including the previous adaptations of this very short story, a 1965 Boris-Karloff-starring AIP production under the dubious title DIE MONSTER DIE and the 1987 Wil Wheaton movie THE CURSE). Even RE-ANIMATOR, arguably the only legitimately good Lovecraft movie ever made, can’t claim that; it doubles down on goopy effects and campy humor instead. Capturing the classic Lovecraftian sense of cosmic, incomprehensible unease is a tough thing to do, but Stanley and company manage it beautifully here, and without even a trace of the pretentious self-consciousness that has defined a lot of modern "post-horror" movies with similar ambitions. In a world of THE VVITCHes and HEREDITARYs, I’d almost forgotten that “heavy on atmospheric dread” does not have to mean “gloomy” and “glacial,” but Stanley keeps things colorful and spritely while managing to work up quite a head of anxiety. It’s Lovecraft distilled through the mind of a distinctly oddball auteur**** (I doubt ol’ H.P. would have thought to introduce our protagonist in the middle of a white magic ceremony as a cute little character detail, or clarify that the hippie holy fool who squats on their property as a cat named “G-Spot”) but it is still very recognizably Lovecraft, a virtue which, despite the virtual cottage industry his work has inspired, almost nothing else can boast.

The movie is also helped quite a bit by a surprisingly fine cast, who vividly portray the family’s gradual slide into dreamy madness while still crafting sharply-defined, likeable --and often quite funny!-- characters. In the Q & A that followed the screening, Stanley mentions that he worked with the actors on their characters’ backstories, which makes sense; even though we get only tiny glimpses into what their lives were like before the events of the film, they feel unusually fully-formed. Even as things get weird, the family dynamic feels complex and lived-in; they seem unusually genuine for a genre movie, convincingly reading as an existing family unit rather than a bunch of body count whose existence is entirely defined by the circumstances of the plot. Madeline Arthur (BIG EYES) as the Gardner family’s teenage daughter and our protagonist, is especially great, managing a character who feels very lively and specific in a way which the movie absolutely does not require, but definitely benefits from. Brendan Meyer (THE GUEST) and Joely Richardson (EVENT HORIZON) do equally nuanced, likeable character work with the older brother and anxiety-fraught mother, respectively.

And of course, you’ve also got the father, one Nicolas Cage. He’s, um, a real character, possibly a little unhinged, given to doing a verbal impersonation of his own father, who all visual and audio evidence suggests was born in, like 1885, despite the movie taking place in modern times. IMDB trivia claims that “Richard Stanley's favorite Cage Movie is Vampire's Kiss (1988), [and] he asked Nicolas to use the same style of performance,” a claim I was initially rather dubious of, until I discovered that Stanely mentions VAMPIRE’S KISS by name in at least two distinct interviews. The finished film mostly doesn’t pitch Cage at quite that level, but it’s definitely a weird performance. And not entirely to the movie’s benefit, in my estimation; he matches, in some ways, the charming eccentricities of the rest of the family, but Cage's now-expected eagerness for full-on mega-acting turns out to be sort of an unhelpful distraction here. It's not a bad performance (it was made worse by my audience, a bunch of hipster douchebags who appear to consider any line that Cage speaks in any movie, regardless of context, inherently hilarious) but it's noticeably a bit broader and more cartoony than the rest of the cast, who are not exactly going for underplayed minimalism either, but who keep their escalating madness a little more grounded and wind up equally impactful but more emotionally effective.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Cage, and you hire him for his mega-acting superpower, obviously. But I think Stanley should have kept a tighter leash on him in this case. It feels like Cage is trying to go over the top, rather than just responding naturally to the insane situation the movie puts him in. It’s an entertaining performance, and Cage is terrific with the script’s dark --but slightly goofy-- humor, but I worry he’s turning into a bit of a parody by this point in his career. Those dipshits laughing at every single thing he said are definitely morons, but I feel like he’s been encouraging them. Of course, this is also his first film in a long time which is actually good enough on its own merits that it becomes a problem when he tries to hijack it with his manic weirdness, rather than a saving grace. So I get where he’s coming from. Still, given how well Stanley does pushing the other actors to equally extreme but less excessive and silly psychological states, he might have been better off finding a normal actor and pushing them out of their comfort zone to go a little mega, as opposed to Cage, who by this point seems like he’s barely able to hold his craziness in check even before the plot starts to take a turn towards the weird.

Anyway, Cage’s performance is an illustrative example of where the movie starts to go a little wrong. Stanely, like Cage, seems maybe a little bit too eager to please for his own good, and towards the back half starts to overplay things a bit. It’s nothing derailing, just a few miscalculations: an eerie scene where the “color” affects a family member is diminished by adding an aggressive lightning strike where a subtle implication would have had more impact, for example. Or a surreal, otherworldly tableau is blown into a gaudy light show, pushing the movie’s special effects a little past their budget for no real advantage. It wouldn’t really be that big a deal –in fact, I’d usually commend a low-budget film like this overextending itself a little in the name of whammy—but the frustrating thing is that, for once, the movie doesn’t need it. It does such a fine job with its eerie insinuations and little glimpses that the more standard effects movie razzle-dazzle actually lessens the impact. The more concrete things get, the smaller the movie feels.

Still, all things considered it's kind of a miracle the movie works as well as it does. The hardest part –the inevitable visualization of Lovecraft's famously unseeable color-- is handled with a nifty effect, a kind of shifting, shimmering pink that looks suitably unnatural. The short story described the titular color as “shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum,” a pretty tall order for any primarily visual medium (even one with Yog-Sothoth rooting for it), but the flickering, ever-shifting character of the effect suggests, if not a never-before seen color, at least some kind of inexplicable visual phenomenon which is only partially perceptible to the human senses. What we see crucially suggests that there is much more we don’t see, which is a legitimately clever way to tackle this difficult problem with the adaptation, and is, overall, the guiding philosophy behind the whole movie’s strengths, and indeed, of the original story’s strengths, too. Of the dozens of Lovecraft adaptations I’ve seen, this is perhaps the only one that seems to really understand that, and that’s reason enough to be pleasantly surprised.

 It takes ambition to commit to capturing that kind of tone, and that ambition permeates the whole film. Stanley, who is surely more aware than almost any living director that whatever film he’s currently making might easily be his last, isn’t playing safe for a single second here. Not everything pays off (as I’ve said, at times the film might actually benefit from more restraint), but it’s kind of incredible how many dangerously unexpected choices --the stunt-casting of Tommy Chong, the weird pivot to body horror, the flirtation with psychedelia, filming in sunny, semi-tropical Portugal rather than the expected austere New England-- all somehow manage not just to keep from derailing the movie, but to actually strengthen it. All these disparate strengths don’t necessarily cohere into a unified, architecturally strong framework, though many of them do (the film’s pervasive oddball humor, for example, makes for an unexpectedly effective compliment to its lurking anxiety, rather than setting up the tonal clash one might expect), but strengths are strengths, and COLOR OUT OF SPACE has plenty of unexpected ones. Ol’ Richard Stanley might or might not be the great lost genre auteur his legendary rep has made him out to be, but on the strength of this movie, I’d say the possibility is still on the table. And that alone seemed about as impossible as non-Euclidian geometry and unknown colors a few weeks ago. Sometimes raising the elder gods turns out to be a better idea than you might think.

 *One obvious example would be that of Terrance Mallik, who was hailed as one of cinema’s untouchable geniuses during the 20-30 year hiatus between DAYS OF HEAVEN and his resumption of regular releases in the mid-2000s, only to find an increasingly skeptical critical establishment as his body of work grew.

** To be fair, he did do a short segment in the 2011 anthology film THE THEATRE BIZARRE, but it’s so brief (one of six segments in only 114 minutes) that it was hard to tell much from it. He’d also done two well-regarded documentaries –THE SECRET GLORY and THE WHITE DARKNESS in 2001 and and 2002—and gotten a couple screenplay credits in the intervening years. But still.

***

****IMDB trivia: “Director Richard Stanley and Swedish filmmaker Henrik Möller apparently performed a ritual to the Lovecraftian god Yog-Sothoth while in the Pyrénées to get the film made.” Probably not gonna find that one on Spielberg’s page.

mother!

Mother! (2017)

Dir and written by by Darren Aronofsky

Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer

Whoo, boy. Well, if you needed any further evidence that I’m the worst human being to ever live, I’ll provide it in one sentence: I came perilously close to loving MOTHER! Not quite all the way there, I’ll grant, but far too close for comfort. I can’t even defend my reaction by pleading that I came close loving it in some sort of ironic hipster contrarian way, because as much as I’d like that to be true, I know in my heart it isn’t. Alas, my enjoyment was sincere, and possibly even the reaction director Darren Aronofsky (REQUIEM FOR A DREAM) was hoping for. I mean, I certainly don’t think he intended to make a movie which would be so widely and fiercely despised by everyone, everywhere. Or maybe he did, and it’s just me that’s wrong. But I, for one, found it absolutely compulsively entertaining. Exactly what he thought he was doing with it is, to put it mildly, a little unclear. Whatever he was trying to do, MOTHER! Is unquestionably kind of a dumbass movie, but man oh man, is it unmistakably from the outrageous sensibility of the man who brought us NOAH. And I cannot, in good conscience, pretend to resist that kind of manic insanity.

And that’s a long way from the review I thought I’d be writing for this one. Honestly the only reason I was even in the theater was because I was charmed by the vivid intensity of everyone’s hatred, and thought I’d better get in there early and see what all the fuss was about. This deep into pop culture hell, notoriety is vastly more intriguing to me than earnest praise, and I figured this might be my best chance in years to hate-watch something really magnificently misguided with an equally appalled audience (it’s possible the Trump years have not been good for me psychologically). The idea that I’d actually like it never even occurred to me.

After all, let’s just get this out in the open: it’s been increasingly clear for some time now that Aronofsky is a total doofus. A talented doofus, to be sure, but a doofus nonetheless. It wasn’t alway apparent, of course; back when PI came out, it seemed fresh and smart and ambitious, and I adored it. And well I should: it was (and remains) pretty much the perfect starter set for a neophyte cinephile who wants to be into pretentious art cinema but hasn’t quite done the legwork yet to know the ropes. He followed that one with REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, which packed such a powerful, visceral cinematic punch that almost nobody at the time, including me, ever reflected back on how ridiculously silly and overwrought it actually was under all those flashy trappings. With two rapturously received Serious Important Grown Up movies under his belt, Aronofsky seemed like the real deal, a gen-u-ine auteurial master for our times. Then he was attached for years to about a thousand projects which never materialized, and finally when THE FOUNTAIN did come out it wasn’t so hot, but then again we knew it was a compromised mess where the budget disappeared and he couldn’t really make it the way he wanted, and it wasn’t his fault, and hey, it doesn’t quite seem to add up but there are definitely, like, ideas in there, right? And he did marry Rachel Weisz (DREAM HOUSE) so obviously he’s was man of class and distinction.

sick mustache, bro.

My opinion of him really started to change with BLACK SWAN, though. It’s still a technically superb film, but I couldn’t help but notice that, uh, it’s dumb as rocks, just absolutely packed to the gills with over-the-top histrionic silly nonsense treated with almost parodic hyper-seriousness. And that made me kind of reconsider, for all its cinematic potency, how shamelessly melodramatic REQUIEM is. But then again, BLACK SWAN is also a movie from the perspective of a brittle, comically repressed teenage drama queen, and so I thought hey, maybe it just shares its main character’s ridiculously hypersensitive perspective. It’s definitely a lot of trashy fun, after all, so who am I to complain?

And then, NOAH.

Oh man, I fucking love NOAH, but it’s the first film where it became unmistakably obvious that Aronofsky’s ambition had outpaced his intelligence. Not that it outpaced his skill as a filmmaker, mind you, which remained as rock-solid as ever. But NOAH is as pristine an example as ever existed of an artist whose burning need to be thought of as A Serious Artist Who Thinks Big Important Things had superseded his ability to know where high melodrama ended and arch camp began. Which did not make it less enjoyable to me; just possibly enjoyable in a different way than the director intended. The combination of masterful filmmaking, utter grimness, wildly expensive production and total fucking insanity is just so spectacularly perfect. I mean, who could possibly think NOAH was a good idea except Aronofsky? It’s a movie which is 100% earnest about the tragic inner life of giant rock monsters, certain that a simple environmental allegory requires vast intricate battle scenes, and at the end it turns into a slasher flick out of fucking nowhere, like SUNSHINE. Except that the good guy is the slasher!

What’s not to love, unless you have the misfortune of being a normal human being or anyone who has ever experienced even a glimmer of irony? It’s way too blasphemous for the religious, way too religious for the secular, too slow for action fans, but bloated with too much spectacle for serious critics, too dumb for intellectuals, but too talky for the popcorn crowd, and the one thing you might imagine would be the easy selling point of the story of fucking Noah’s Ark (the animals!) are a tiny, minor plot point. And yet, on a technical level it’s absolutely impeccable. It may be one of the best movies ever made that no one alive could possibly be expected to like.

Except me, of course. I am constitutionally incapable of disliking something which is simultaneously so well made and so spectacularly miscalculated.

Jennifer Lawrence at the MOTHER! premier

And it is, without question or equivocation, entirely this Aronofsky who brings us MOTHER!*, another epic-length, possibly environmentally-themed opus which is simultaneously spectacularly well made and spectacularly miscalculated. Though, truth be told, I have to accept the “miscalculated” part based purely on the collective response so unambiguously provided by my fellow cinema-goers. Honest to God, I would never have guessed, based on the movie itself, that it would go over quite as poorly with the public as it did. I mean, I could have told you that turning the two-page Bible story of Noah’s Ark into a fantasy-epic/claustrophobic slasher was misguided folly (it made $362 million worldwide and remains Aronofsky’s highest-grossing film by an enormous margin, haha). I couldn’t have guessed that MOTHER!’s frothy mix of blobby religious allegory and nightmarish awkwardness-porn surreal horror setpieces would be so thoroughly rejected by every other living person on Earth. OK, looking back at that last sentence in stark black and white, I guess I sort of can figure out what the problem might have been, but I swear to you --swear-- that had I just caught this on a lark and not heard anything about it, I would have assumed it would be immediately hailed as cult triumph, a ready-made midnight movie masterpiece.

Which it may yet end up being, I suppose. As it has flitted from the collective consciousness of a furious mainstream into a the subterranean strata of more self-selecting audiences willing to meet it on its own terms, I’ve seen a few flickering of approval. (Which is why it belonged there in the first place, duh; the idea that they released this in mainstream theaters with the fucking MY LITTLE PONY movie is the most bizarre distribution decision since I saw TUSK downtown in a giant empty downtown Washington DC Regal Cinema)

Still, even at that, I honestly don’t understand how people hated it as much as they did. I mean, it’s just so fucking entertaining, like, every single second of the runtime! It’s almost pandering how intent it is on keeping you entertained. Given that magnificent, unfettered “F” cinemascore, I entered the theater expecting some kind of endurance-testing glacial BROWN BUNNY-esque opaque exercise in audience frustration. But it’s not that at all. MOTHER! Is a hoot, and really the only problem it has is that it is, at times, just a little too accommodating and generous in its explanations for its own good. David Lynch would never allow something to explain itself so thoroughly and resolve itself so neatly, and that’s why he’s the king and Darren Aronofsky is just an overcaffeinated kid trying to entertain the ladies at his mother’s book club. But lordy, he’s a really fucking entertaining overcaffeinated kid. He’s annoying, sure, but a hoot is a hoot.

Michelle Pfeiffer is unamused by your antics

Granted, the premise doesn’t exactly scream “whiz-bang entertainment.” Actually it sounds very much like the pretentious bore that everyone seemed to describe watching. Here is how IMDB describes it: “A couple's relationship is tested when uninvited guests arrive at their home, disrupting their tranquil existence.” And here’s the thing: that description is technically accurate. And, absent a few details, it isn’t just a premise, that’s a description of the entire thing. The whole thing takes place in one house, and everything that occurs revolves around the disruption brought on by unexpected visitors (which also describes FUNNY GAMES, for that matter -- a movie which truly does deeply and persistently desire your hatred, unlike poor MOTHER! which just begs you to love it). But describing it that way really sort of misses the point; it’s like describing GODZILLA with: “Scientists observe a large aquatic animal which comes ashore in Tokyo.” Technically accurate, but the details make a big difference.

For one thing, it’s almost instantly obvious that the unnamed husband (Javier Bardem, fun fact, there’s an Alex de la Iglesia movie called DANCE WITH THE DEVIL that features Bardem, Rosie Perez, Demian Bicher James Gandolfini and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins!) represents --or maybe literally is-- God, capital G, and Jennifer Lawrence (THE BEAVER), his wife, is the title character. God’s wife, in other words, which would make her our MOTHER!. The movie is fanatically insistent on driving this point home immediately and unequivocally, and demands that the fact that you’re watching symbols! never leaves your mind for even a second of runtime thereafter (the character don’t even have personal names, just descriptions like “mother,” “man,” “herald,” “zealot,” etc).

For another thing, the “disruption” brought by the “uninvited guests” begins benignly enough (with the arrival of “Man” Ed Harris [KNIGHTRIDERS] and “Woman” Michelle Pfeiffer [GREASE 2], who have just a hint of pushy oddness to them), but, without ever leaving the home, will gradually escalate into some total fucking craziness which is as brutally immersive as any film since CHILDREN OF MEN.

Your ability to balance those two aspects of the film will probably determine your enjoyment of it. Because they are, of course, completely contradictory, right? On one hand, you have a movie whose greatest strength (in my eyes, anyway) is its wild, frenzied intensity, its ability to evoke increasingly stressful situations and drag the viewer right into the thick of it with the characters, to plunge them headfirst into its world and never relent. On the other hand... how can it do that when it’s so flagrantly artificial and insistently allegorical that its characters might as well have what they symbolize printed on them in big letters like a 19th-century political cartoon? I know your hero and mine Mr. Majestyk had this problem, ultimately finding the film’s heavy-handed symbolism too alienating to identify with the characters and their predicament in the way you’d need to to feel any real concern or tension about what happens to them. After all, they’re not characters who happen to symbolize things; they’re just symbols, and the plot is just the literal articulation of how Aronofsky thinks these symbols are related to each other, and is not interested in the slightest in ever letting you forget that you’re supposed to be learning a lesson here. So their fates are completely arbitrary and preordained; it’s more important to try to unravel their meaning than it is to relate to them, which can obviously be utterly antithetical to your ability to get invested in the ostensible story.

But of course, it’s absolutely crucial to the movie that you do get invested in the events unfolding, because they’re the best part, and because whatever valuable life lesson Aronofsky thinks he’s generously providing to us, his real calling is not as a lecturer but a master of the moving image, and he pulls out absolutely all the stops here to craft as evocative a living nightmare as I’ve ever seen put to celluloid. And if you can get past the movie’s admittedly persistent and blatant insistence that it’s about something, you’re in for a truly heady mixture of magnificent, virtuoso filmmaking and brazen, fearless nuttiness the likes of which will surely not come around our way for many a year.

To me, that’s the whole show, and the long and short of why I was able to perform the feat of enjoying MOTHER!. For whatever reason, I was able to safely compartmentalize Aronofsky’s flop-sweating parable and simply accept the experience at face value. And, seen this way, I think MOTHER! Is a real triumph, a horror movie which plays off our fears of social discomfort, personal inadequacy, and powerlessness in a chaotic world in ways which are incisive and brilliantly realized. It has a long, perfectly coiled buildup as things subtly and without clear direction begin to slide out of the control of our main character (from whose perspective the entirety of the move takes place, unless I’m greatly mistaken), and, just as it reaches a fever pitch, the movie suddenly stops, pauses and resets, and then begins the entire process over again (a structure which also mimics a key symbolic arc in the film) except at an even more frantic register. It’s expertly paced (though possibly it pauses just a hair too long in-between its two stretches of frantic escalation, losing momentum rather than simply allowing a respite), patient enough to allow the tension to imperceptibly ratchet up, but not so glacial that it feels uneventful or sparse. It’s quite eventful, actually, even before things really start unravelling.

Hey kids! It's beloved genre favorite Stephen McHattie! [Applause]

As to what it all means, I find that much less of an interesting question, which is where Aronofsky and I probably part ways. Alas, I cannot tell a lie, as much as Aronofsky seems more at home simply providing a wild cinematic thrill ride, this is, after all, a movie which steadfastly refuses to allow its symbols to ever even wander in the direction of being real characters, and so there’s no way to escape the distasteful “what does it all mean?” conversation. In fact, he’s so insistent on the message he’s trying to get across here that even though the movie basically comes right out and screams it at you**, he took the demeaning additional step of actually spelling it out, going on something of a multi-media press junket to get down in print exactly what we’re meant to take from all this. 

And it’s what must inevitably bring us back to the fact that, for all his raw talent, Aronofsky is still ultimately a doofus, a superb craftsman who, like Christopher Nolan (whose MEMENTO came the same year as REQUIEM), was praised too much too early and is now cast into the awkward position of being a celebrated genius communicator without the benefit of anything too interesting to actually communicate. An artist explaining their art, of course, is about as antithetical to enjoying it as explaining a puppy to a child by dissecting it, and that’s a fact so patently obvious that I simply assume that when an artist does it, they don’t understand their own art. MOTHER! Is very much a film which wants to convey a message, but Art, capital A, is not about conveying messages -- it’s about creating an aesthetic and emotional experience. Write an essay if you want to communicate a point. Make art if you want to explore the ephemeral, something more rewarding and elusive than anything as dreary and humdrum as a message could ever be, especially one as sophomoric and dopey as this one, which for all its sound and fury barely rises above the philosophical level of an especially baroque Jewel song.

And yet, for all that, I think Aronofsky has succeeded here in spite of himself. As The New Yorker’s Richard Brody titled his absolutely essential essay on the subject we’re discussing here: “Darren Aronofsky Says “Mother!” Is About Climate Change, But He’s Wrong.” After all, Aronofsky would hardly be the first artist to be wrong about his own work. And you’ll notice that I do call him an artist, despite everything. He may think MOTHER! Is about religion, or climate change, or even (ironically) the other obvious interpretation, the process of creating art. But it’s about those things only superficially and incidentally, and probably even to the movie’s detriment, in that they literalize things which are best left to the murky realm of the subconscious (one of the movie’s worst instincts, and the one which definitively holds it back from true greatness, is to literalize its symbols -- the “heart of the house” is an actual physical CG heart, the destruction and rejuvenation imagery is a special effects mess instead of a simple and elegant montage dissolve which would work infinitely better). At its heart, it’s not a message movie. It is, simply and sincerely, a horror movie, a movie which magnificently captures the rising fury of a panic attack as things spiral out of our control. Everyone has had this experience; everyone can see themselves as “mother!” frantically runs around her overrun house, trying to take back some sliver of control and instead finding things growing obstinately more sinister and goading. Even if we can’t get any sense of her character, the experience itself is so immediately potent that we know it, we feel it, and we can live through it as Aronofsky sadistically unspools it on-screen. That’s real. That isn’t a lecture. That’s Art, capital A. And it’s what makes Aronofsky an artist still worthy of respect and consideration, even if he doesn’t fully understand why, and even if he’s manifestly a total doofus.

Of course, your enjoyment of that bit of art is still probably contingent on how much you’ll enjoy enduring a slow burn 121 minute social-anxiety panic attack pushily masquerading as a lecture on environmentalism. Mr. Majestk dubbed the film “LARRY DAVID’S WAITING FOR GODOT 2: BRIDE OF GODOT,” and described it as a "Godot pastiche thought up by two stoners while playing The Sims,” a designation which I can in no way meaningfully dispute. But what doesn’t sound good about that, again? If you’re willing to look past the film MOTHER! Obviously thinks it is, there’s a masterpiece of absurd horror lounging around, waiting to be discovered. And that’s more than enough to earn the exclamation mark.

*As a general rule of style, I always capitalize movie titles to make them easier to spot and pick out. But the correct written version of MOTHER! Is actually all lower-case with an exclamation mark, as in “mother!”

** In short: Bardem is God, Lawrence is Mother! Earth! Harris and Pfeiffer are Adam and Eve, their beefing kids are Cain and Abel, and the “unexpected guests” who subsequently show up and cause so much chaos and ruin are human who are fucking up the Earth but flattering God enough that he won’t keep them in check. In other words, the point is that global warming is bad, says Aronofsky.

Is it "controversial" if pretty much everyone agrees they hate it?

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	Too classy to have a tagline
TITLE ACCURACY	Yup, that’s a mother, all right.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Nope, although honestly it might work better as a book. Do they still do movie novelizations?
SEQUEL?	No, but count me in if they ever get to MOTHERS!
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Surreal horror
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	The whole cast
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Stephen McHattie! Hey, look at you there buddy, in a real movie.
NUDITY?	Pretty sure there’s at least one shot of boobs, but not in a sexy context.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Definitely an uncomfortable sexual experience where she’s resisting but then gets into it, hello 1950’s
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Doubtful
POSSESSION?	No…?
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	Yes
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Not as such
VOYEURISM?	No
MORAL OF THE STORY	Never send an intellectual to do an artist’s job