Mother! (2017)

Darren Aronofsky's Mother! isn't a film I liked much at all, but one thing you have to give it is that it's worth talking about. At the very least, it's interesting – so I guess I'm saying this is the cinematic equivalent of a guy wearing a clown costume and alternately blowing a trumpet while screaming Bible verses on the street corner. It's annoying and pretentious, but at least it isn't boring.

And yeah – there are gonna be SPOILERS in this one!

To be fair, there are some decent parts to this... the directing is nice and can have a rather uncomfortable claustrophobic feel to it, and the acting is good. The first half or so is a decent enough curiosity, telling an odd story of a couple trying to keep up a perfect house and stalled writing career when a stranger (Ed Harris) comes to the door and ends up staying with them. Everything is creepy and foreboding enough that you want to see where it goes – though later on, when the guy's wife shows up, it turns out the scariest thing in the movie is really just marital insecurity over whether or not Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem are going to have kids.

Mostly, the tension in this comes from how much everyone treats Lawrence like shit – her character is just constantly stepped on in this. It's revealed that Ed Harris is a big fan of Bardem's poetry, I guess – and he's also dying of cancer.

Then things take a bizarre turn when Ed Harris's two psychotic sons come to the house and have no problem at all getting into a violent fist fight over their father's will, or some shit like that, and it ends as one of them kills the other. Bardem and the family go with him to the hospital while Lawrence cleans up the blood. What a good wife she is. I would have just fucking left.

And this is really where the movie starts to lose me and the problems start to become apparent. What happens next is a pretty crazy parade of people who know Ed Harris' character come and stay at the house to mourn the dead son while waiting for the funeral. They partake in all kinds of merry funeral activities like having sex in the bedroom, having sex on the stairs and trying to have sex on an unstable kitchen counter that explodes through the wall and rains sewer water everywhere – just good that these assholes are keeping things proper for the funeral mood. They have no logic or reason to it of course; they're just unrealistically nasty, because they have to be for this to work at all.

Lawrence, after like 20 minutes of screentime trying to get them to calm the fuck down and listen to her, finally melts down and screams for everyone to leave. I guess this was all it took. Why didn't she just lose her shit earlier then? Apparently that's the only thing these people will respond to. Not the dead guy they apparently knew – just a random woman losing her shit.

But seriously – this is one of the movie's problems, honestly. I just can't see the character or logic in what she's doing here. She's way too passive about everything. And I know – it's the metaphor of it all, about how she's supporting her husband even though it's tough. But that just doesn't make a good movie for me. Her actions, and the plot as a whole, only seem to exist to serve the metaphor. Everything is just about that message; there's no actual insight into the character. Lawrence is just moved around like a chess-piece so Aronofsky can say look at this message I have, and while all fiction is sorta like that, it really does come off as too transparent here. It's just too easy of a story when you can handwave away anything by saying it's the message! I just find stories more interesting when they're well-constructed around how people actually act in the modern civilized world around each other.

Then things get even worse and more insane when Bardem completes his work of poetry and then, without apparently sending it to anyone or advertising, people begin coming there on a pilgrimage to worship him for his art, even going so far as to set up churches and start treating him like a God. And before you get any crazy ideas, no, this has nothing to do with how Aronofsky sees his own art...

Things do get slightly out of hand when bombs start falling on the house randomly and people get lined up and executed like some kind of African jungle war prisoner ritual or something. Yes, I'm serious – you didn't click into another movie review. It's all very over the top and, while it's entertaining for how batshit crazy it is, you start to check your watch after a while. How long is this gonna go, anyway? I'm an American – we see this shit on TV all day.

Lawrence has the baby and Bardem insists on taking it from her to show to the raving hordes of religious nutballs who now worship him as a God. Within like, a few minutes, they tear the baby apart and eat it, which I am really curious if they got the anatomy right. We should consult some scientists. It would be a shame if the movie got this part wrong – would totally ruin its credibility.

Lawrence, after she gets the shit beaten out of her in a gruesome scene even I have to admit was effective, burns down the house and finally kills everyone except for herself and Bardem – curiously without a scratch on him. He carries her through the house burnt to a fucking crisp, and then takes her heart, the last thing she has left to give him.

Then it turns out Bardem is actually using her heart to restore his entire home to exactly how it was before - he is some kind of vampire or something, I guess, and while I get what the movie is saying here, about artists feeding on others' generosity, it is kind of funny, you have to admit. I think it's humorous that this is how this movie ended.

And I get it, okay – I get the message here. It's saying a lot about the tenets of marriage, especially to one so drawn to art, and the differences between how the archetypal Man and Woman act. Some of it is at least passably interesting commentary, not coming off as anything too dumb or base-level.

But there's just no real meat to this as a movie – all there is is the message. Everything is totally in service to that message. And that means basically nothing that actually happens in the movie has any significance. It's all just metaphoric, anyway; every bit of what happens. The rude people treating Lawrence like shit, the bombs falling, the execution, the eating of the child – it all just passes over with the airy, transparent feel of a ghost, because it doesn't matter. Nobody talks about the repercussions behind any of it, and the people don't act like real people, because they're all just chess-pieces and mouth-pieces for Aronofsky's message. It all exists only because Aronofsky needed to get a point across, which consequently comes off extremely heavy-handed.

I just find this a dull, almost immature way to write a movie. Personally it didn't gel with me. I know some people really liked it – such is the nature of taste. I like movies that treat the characters as more nuanced and complex beings. This one didn't do that for me.

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