Released: September 15, 2017
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Screenplay: Darren Aronofsky
Tagline: "Seeing is believing"
Cast:
Jennifer Lawrence as mother
Javier Bardem as Him
Ed Harris as man
Michelle Pfeiffer as woman
Domhnall Gleeson as oldest son
Brian Gleeson as younger brother
First Time View?: Oh yeah
mother! (intentionally stylized with the lower-case "m" and "!" because SYMBOLISM) is the latest film from head-trippy writer/director Darren Aronofsky, who is best known for Requiem for a Dream (2000), the most disturbing but successful anti-drug drama you'll ever find, and Black Swan (2010), the sinister ballet thriller that won over audiences and critics alike and earned Natalie Portman a Best Actress Oscar. Despite debates over categorization for these movies, I argue that all three are psychological horror films. They're designed to mess with your head, produce a sense of rising dread and unease, leaving a sense of pervasive devastation in their wake, and all mix in body horror and a few jump scares for safe measure. Watching an Aronofsky film often leaves one feeling battered, tearful, and scrambling to throw Family Guy up on Netflix.
mother! is no exception, and yet it is. We follow a married couple, Bardem, playing a once-famous poet, and Lawrence, home renovator and caretaker extraordinaire, as their peaceful lives in their grand, crumbling home in the middle of nowhere becomes disrupted by surprise guests, leading to a series of increasingly violent and bizarre events. Unlike its famous predecessors, mother! was marketed as the horror film that it is, but in a strange way, giving off a more straightforward home invasion or even a haunting vibe. Don't get me wrong, the horror is there, but not in the ways that the trailer leads you to believe. The intense push to connect the film to Rosemary's Baby (1968) was a little overdone, though there are obvious echoes in the film itself. The mother character is certainly framed by her husband, Him, to be paranoid and over-reactionary to potentially dangerous situations. The isolated mansion, which mother is slowly rebuilding into a "paradise" could be something straight out of a Gothic horror melodrama, and the unwelcome visitors (Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer) steer the film both into both home invasion and vampire flick territory. There are all sorts of things it could be, and that it even becomes at different points, all under the bent umbrella of psychological horror, and part of the point of the movie is to figure out what kind of story it is, something unusual in mainstream cinema.
Therein lies the crux, though, because mother! is not mainstream cinema, it's arthouse cinema masquerading as having widespread appeal. That charade goes out the window in the third act when things go so topsy-turvy not even the most seasoned film analysts could predict the outcome. If you know a thing or two about literary subtext, however, you'll fare far better. Hell, if you ever went to Sunday school, you'll know exactly what Aronofsky is doing. Because, as Frodo would say, at the end of all things, mother! is an allegory. An allegory of biblical proportions.
"Looking for my motivation..."
Metaphorical storytelling can work very, very well in the horror genre. Recent worthy examples would be It Follows (2014) and The Babadook (2014). In these sorts of films, the scenarios on the surface are just window dressing, familiar stories to engage the mainstream viewer while the real story plays out under the surface, hidden behind invisible entities and unknown dangers that stand in for ideas and concepts far grander. For It Follows, the dangers of modern hook-up culture, emotional and physical consequences of sex. For The Babadook, the manifestations of grief and depression. With mother!, there is not as clear of a one-on-one parallel.
It's biblical allegory, most certainly. Javier Bardem's Him, the only character whose name is capitalized in the credits, functions as God, the great creator bathing in the worship of hordes of increasingly volatile fans, who even utters the line "I am I" at one point. Lawrence is mother, THE mother--Mother Earth--cultivating the idyllic Eden the two share with her gentle touch, always pictured barefoot and in soft, warm tones, whose fury is unleashed once she is pushed too far. Harris, Pfeiffer, and the Gleeson brothers play out the drama of Adam and Eve, and the tragedy of Cain and Abel. Gradually we move through early biblical stories--there's even a flood metaphor in the form of a burst pipe--until the house is swarming with crazed, cultic fans; overrun with violence and nonsensical, chaotic imagery all culminating in a tragic and grotesque climax that sets the world ablaze. Armageddon, if you will.
But of course, it is also about art. About the incubine relationship between artist and muse. It is about marriage and how women can be undercut, silenced, and trapped in abusive relationships with seemingly benign men. It's about Aronofsky himself, and his inability to put his loved ones before his work. It's about siphoning the emotions of others to fuel one's own ego. It's about the dangers of organized religion and how it can lend itself to radicalism and fanaticism. It's about the ecology, climate change, and nasty ways we treat our one home planet. It's about how the relationship between audience and art can be vicious and disturbing. It's about nightmares and claustrophobia and madness and love and obsession and passion and sacrifice. Sounds like it's about everything right? That it could stand in or mean all these different ideas, represent all these different concepts? Except, in the end, it's about nothing. Which is unfortunate.
That guy just ate the last deviled egg!
There's too much going on in mother! All of these symbols and metaphors swirling around to play out this allegory don't have any real weight behind them. Just because your film is an allegory, doesn't make it a good film. mother! says nothing new. The layers and interpretations of the allegory are too varied and too abstract. This leaves the movie meaning a lot, but without that meaning actually meaning anything...gosh, can I say "meaning" one more time?
My point being, we all know these messages that mother! is trying to convey. We know that we mistreat the earth and that religion can be dangerous and that artists can prioritize their work over loved ones. We get it. We know. And if we didn't know, the movie spells it out for us but without offering any real commentary on any of these subjects. There's no cohesive point to any of it. Not, I admit, that allegory has to have a point at all, but in the case of mother! it feels as though these empty symbols are just pandering to film studies students who get giddy over the fact that they "get it." We all get it, Scott. Doesn't mean that it's good.
Is it well made? Absolutely. It's a visual treat. Well-acted? Most definitely. Lawrence conveys a sad, confused and oblivious creature who has been abused and blind to that abuse for too long, while Bardem succeeds as the selfish and shallow misguided writer who tends to his talent in favor of his wife. But he's nowhere near as annoying as the Harris and Pfeiffer characters, draining, overreaching leeches that make you want to reach through the screen and slap them silly every time they open their mouths (this is a good thing by the way, it means Harris and Pfeiffer did their jobs). But the solid acting is inhibited by the great Allegory; everything is so shallow and stereotypical and overfilled with SYMBOL and METAPHOR that you can't form a real emotional attachment because you're just waiting for the next strange moment to decipher.
"And I'm the exclamation point!"
So there was a lot I liked here. As I said, it's beautiful to watch. The opening sequence in particular. mother wakes from a nightmare and stumbles through the entire house, giving us the grand tour of this lush, beautiful prison. She throws open the front door and we see the confinement juxtaposed with the isolation of the house itself--there are no driveways or roads anywhere in sight. Even if our conscious brain doesn't register this at first, our subconscious picks up on it, and we're unsettled. This world is a snow globe. Nothing exists beyond the house, and so the nightmare will never end. This is a hellish heaven, an infested garden.
I don't think that mother! deserves the hate that it's getting from certain circles (i.e. that harsh "F' rating from CinemaScore), but I also don't think it's masterpiece either. I applaud Paramount for mainstreaming an art-house film and giving audiences an option outside of superhero schlock and repetitive remakes, I just think the intent and the messages behind Aronofsky's all-encompassing allegory were lost in translation here. And I think it leaves the film feeling pretentious, vapid, cold, clinical, nihilistic, and mean. Perhaps that was the intention, in which case I say bravo. But if he wanted to make a call to arms about the great issues that face our world, or to provide real social commentary and create dialogue about that commentary, I think the film could have used a bit more nurturing before he sent it out into the world.
mother!
5-Totally Terrifying
4-Crazy Creepy
3-Fairly Frightening
2-Slightly Scary
1-Hardly Horror
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