Darren Aronofsky is an auteur filmmaker with a very specific
set of interests: body horror, intense relationship melodrama involving upscale
characters, characters questioning whether they or the rest of the world has
lost their mind, on-the-nose allegories for religion and the experience of
being a creative person, and a heavy dose of high-octane nightmare fuel. This
is evident to anyone who’s seen his past work like Pi, Requiem for A Dream or
Black Swan. Hell, even his most straightforward, down to earth movie, The Wrestler, has most of these
elements. In the case of Mother!,
they all come clashing together in an incendiary mission statement that
Aronofsky has chucked into theaters like a Molotov cocktail. It’s the kind of
movie that can only come from an auteur with an intense vision who’s been given
the keys to the kingdom and has let loose to with no one around to say no to
his ideas, even if it’s to his own detriment.
Our story follows a couple who have moved into a decrepit
old mansion in the middle of nowhere. The husband (Javier Bardem) is a poet
going through a major case of writer’s block who holes himself up in his study
trying to find inspiration, while his significantly younger wife (Jennifer Lawrence)
dedicates her time to renovating the house. Their peace is disrupted when a
pair of strangers (Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeifer) show up at their door and
make themselves at home. The husband doesn’t mind their company as it turns out
they’re big fans of his work, but the wife is uneased by their presence,
especially when they refuse to leave. Eventually more and more fans arrive,
which gets the husband’s creative juice flowing again among other things, but
their behavior and blatant disregard for their surroundings and her well-being sets
the wife on the edge of a nervous breakdown, leaving her to question if she’s
going crazy or if everyone around her is.
Fair warning to anyone who decides to go see Mother!: there’s a pretty high chance that
you will despise this movie with every fiber of your being. And not just the
kind of hate that leaves a bad pit in your stomach, but the kind that makes you
actively go out of your way to warn your friends and family about it and
mentally blacklist everyone who had a hand in making it. In fact, when a family
friend of mine called it the worst movie he ever saw, I took it as a challenge.
It’s the kind of movie that would never make it to theaters if not for the star
power of Aronofsky and Jennifer Lawrence, and would be career suicide for
anyone else who would dare to try. But trying is one thing, succeeding is
another.
The movie has enough shock value to have the audience
clutching its pearls, but it sure takes its sweet time getting the ball
rolling. There are a few sparse moments where the wife finds strange oddities
around the house like blood dripping from the floors and human organs in the
toilet, and there’s a confrontation between the visiting couple and their sons
that turns deadly, but things don’t really kick into high gear until the third
act. Those hoping that this would be a non-stop crazy train will have to be
patient.
The plot itself could be interpreted two ways. Going back to
Aronofsky’s favorite themes, it could be seen as either a metaphor for the
relationship between Man, God and the Earth, or the relationship between an
artist and its fans. In both cases, the guests blatant disregard for the
well-being of the wife and cult-like devotion to the husband could be
interpreted as a microcosm of The Bible (Jeremy Jahns explains it better than I ever could) or how an artist’s fate is to ultimately be consumed and torn apart
by fans that revere its creator like a god. If that sounds incredibly
pretentious and ham-fisted, that’s because it is, and it’s probably what’s
going to be a deal breaker for a lot of you. That, and its third act is a
cavalcade of Caligulan barbarism straight of a Bosch painting, all culminating
in one of the most unfathomably brutal acts of cruelty I’ve ever seen in a
movie. (Don't watch this if you're pregnant. Just, don't.)
If the layers and layers of metaphor or Aronofsky’s general
style of filmmaking isn’t what will make or break this movie for you, that last
act will. It’s a divisive movie by design, but speaking only for myself, it
didn’t do much for me either way. Don’t get me wrong, I was shocked by that third act and
impressed when everything started to click, but the buildup and payoff were a
bit dissonant, I was able to piece together what was going on pretty quickly, the
cinematography was decent but subpar by Aronofsky standards, and the acting, despite
its star power, was nothing to write home about. Which is a shame because I’ve loved
every Aronofsky movie I’ve seen up to this point, and balls-to-the-wall
high-concept crazy auteur filmmaking like this is normally my bread and butter.
I don't know, maybe I’m just harder to shock than I used to be.
Bottom line, Mother!
will inevitably go down as one of the most divisive movies of the decade. If
everything I just described sounds like it’s up your alley, or if you’re a fan
of gory arthouse films like The Neon
Demon or Raw, then you’ll
probably get more out of this than I did. If you’re the kind of person who can’t
handle sacrilege acts of unnecessary cruelty, then this is not the movie for
you. As for me, let me put it this way: whenever I see a Darren Aronofsky film,
I end up feeling like it’s a perfect movie that I never want to see again. Usually
that’s because I end up feeling like my soul was destroyed. Not this time
around. I didn’t feel anything by the end. And in a way, that’s even worse. Darren, whatever you needed to get out of your system by making this, I hope it worked.
6/10
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