Mother! (2017)
Mother! made a big splash when it hit the festival circuit. It was divisive, to say the least. The conversation veered from talking about it as a brilliant masterpiece to pretentious garbage. It's remained a controversial film since. There were a number of best of the decade and best of the century lists it was included in though, and since the hyperbole which comes with the release of films as polarizing as Mother! has subsided, the conversation surrounding it has gotten more interesting. I've recently felt like I might have missed one of the more interesting films of the last two decades, and it turns out I did. Mother! is an intense, imaginative, beautifully shot and performed film, and very obviously not for everyone.
I have to confess, when Mother! was released in September of 2017, I was not interested in seeing what was obviously an emotionally taxing, deeply unsettling film. I took some time off from this variety of cinema, unconsciously at the time, because real life was emotionally taxing and unsettling enough. I'd seen all but one of Aronofsky's other feature films, and as much I respect his work and genuinely love a few of his films, I wasn't ready to delve into the depths of emotional darkness he can so well evoke at times. Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler and Black Swan for whatever other failings they may have (all three have fierce detractors and defenders), they successfully create a cinematic experience which takes the audience to some dark, tragic, and brutally sad emotional places. I am glad I waited to see Mother!, because this is also an emotionally bruising cinematic experience, while it also means I don't have to wade through the controversy and hyperbole which surrounded it when it was released.
I am purposefully referring to this as a cinematic experience because it eschews what most audiences are going to expect in terms of narrative structure and storytelling framework. Black Swan was essentially a pulpy psychological thriller in framework and plot structure, approached with technique more associated with arthouse cinema. This is the reverse. Mother! is essentially a framework and plot structure more associated with arthouse cinema, with the emotional and psychological technique of a pulpy psychological thriller used as a transparent layer placed on top.
One of the most popular criticisms of Mother! is that the allegory at the films center is too apparent, as in it's not at all hidden. It's true in the objective sense that the allegory isn't hidden. It's subjective to refer to this as a negative. From my subjective perspective, one of the great things about film as an artistic and narrative medium is its plasticity. The Wizard of Oz is a great film. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Exterminating Angels are great films. The Shawshank Redemption for all of its saccharine sweetness is a great film. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a great film, in part because of its unhinged ferocity and nihilistic humor. Young Frankenstein is a great film. Persona and Scenes from a Marriage are great films. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom is a great film, despite containing what can reasonably be argued are some of the most depraved scenes and images ever committed to celluloid. These are all great films, being pinnacles of the art form or expanding the understanding of what is possible within it. Some of them are purposely and inherently accessible to anyone with even the slightest familiarity with narrative and visual storytelling. Some of them take a whole library full of prior cinematic knowledge to make them accessible. Approaching film from either the perspective which requires it to be as accessible as possible or accessible only to a select few, as part of the criteria for what makes good or great film is reductive, at best, and elitist at worst. Jaws is an easily accessible film, and still a masterpiece. 2001: A Space Odyssey is pretty inaccessible without a prior knowledge of film and science fiction as a literary and cinematic genre, and it's a masterpiece.
Aronofsky makes films sitting on the bridge between the two worlds of commercial cinema and arthouse cinema. The Wrestler, taken in summary, could as easily have been a Seth Rogen or Adam Sandler comedy. Instead, it's this bittersweet character piece about what nostalgia, aging, loss and obsession are. He's a child of the 70's era of studio rogues and the invention of the blockbuster, then studied anthropology at Harvard and is a graduate of the American Film Institute.
In his way, Aronofsky helps set the stage for films like The Witch, It Follows, Hereditary and a number of the other films in the last decade which have taken what would more normally considered "low brow" premises and refused to accept they didn't deserve as much cinematic artistry as the kind of arthouse cinema which is normally thought to have less commercial appeal. Back in 2010, Black Swan demonstrated there wasn't just an audience for films using this alchemical formula, but there was also a critical community ready to accept them.
All of this is important because of just how blatantly Mother! wears it's allegory on it's sleeve. It's the kind of film which can become a bridge for movie goers who have a love of what is thought of as more mainstream commercial cinema, and would love a lot of what the world of arthouse or visual art cinema has to offer, if they were exposed to more of it.
This isn't a fun film to watch in the sense of the narrative being fun, but it is fun to watch in the sense of how completely committed it is to it's allegory, and to powering forward, expecting the audience to keep up with basically no exposition. It's absolutely about taking the journey, experiencing the film as it unfolds and contending with it once it's over. There isn't very much time to start wrestling with it as it's happening, because it's an ever escalating experience. Half way through, the escalation shifts into high gear, and it assaults the viewer with images and situations rapidly scaling and rapidly changing. This is akin to some of David Lynch's best exercises in creating a truly dreamlike sense of time passage and logic. It's a bluntly disturbing film, with an ingenuity and creativity which is fun.
The entire cast is outstanding. There are a few surprises, which I don't want to spoil if you haven't seen it yet. Kudos to Paramount and to the film community for keeping them under wraps. It's not going to spoil any part of the experience to say Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem are both excellent. Jennifer Lawrence gives what is arguably the best performance of her career, and the entire film is experienced from her narrative point of view. 90% of the shots in the film are either tight close ups of Lawrence, shots over her shoulder or shots showing her point of view. It's an excellent trick, because as heavily as it leans on its allegory and actively denies the audience other standard narrative signposts and structure, it feels deeply intimate. It really is an amazing performance, and anyone who can stomach cinema which is challenging and left of center, should see it for Lawrence's work alone.
Unfortunately, it's probably Lawrence central role in the project, along with the marketing focused on touting her star performance while saying so little else about the film. Nothing else she'd been in prior to this was going to prepare a Jennifer Lawrence fanbase for what they were about to experience. It was also marketed as something closer to Rosemary's Baby than the film actually is. It's this discrepancy which most likely drove the controversy about the film at release. It's a very different film than the marketing suggested it was going to be. Winter's Bone, the film which catapulted her into roles in the X-Men franchise, as well as the Hunger Games franchise, has as strong an independent spirit as Mother!, but all in all, it's a much more conventionally structured narrative. Winter's Bone is a phenomenal film, starring a 20 year old Jennifer Lawrence, and she is amazing. She brings the same level of talent, and seven more years of experience with some of the best directors and actors in Hollywood to every second of Mother!.
At the same time, this would be extremely difficult to market. It's not a horror film, even as it has been embraced by a significant portion of the horror community. It's a bit too horrific to be at home in most of the arthouse film environment. It's not a romantic drama or a "family drama," even as ideas about love and family are central to it. It's not a political or social polemic, even as it's allegory is both inherently commenting on politics and society. It's very much a singular work, successfully melding different elements, and discarding them the second they've served their purpose.
Matthew Libatique was the cinematographer, and he is a master. The fluid camera movement, the framing of shots conveying as much information as possible, all of it. As much as the films ability to draw genuine emotion out of viewers is due to Jennifer Lawrence, the ability to convey the narrative, the tonal and emotional shifts are due to Libatique proving himself to be one of the great cinematographers of his generation. It doesn't feel flashy, as in calling attention to itself as you're watching the film. It's after, realizing how many different times the camera is moving through the environment, conveying what would have been pages and pages of information in seconds or minutes. It's a unique and strong style, without being bombastic or self indulgent.
If you have any tolerance for cinema which steps outside the bounds of the narrative structure in the way we most often see it, I'd suggest seeing Mother!. If most narrative film storytelling is akin to a short story in written fiction, Mother! is more akin to a narrative poem, which isn't trying to hide its allegory at all. It's a powerful film, and profoundly jarring. If nothing else, whether it works for you as well as it did for me or it doesn't work as well, it's a big swing for the fences by Aronofsky, and it would be great to see studios being willing to budget and back films of this nature more often.