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