mother! review

Much has already been written about the commercial and critical failure of Darren Aronofsky’s latest release “Mother!” The film received an F rating from cinemascore, which polls snap responses from audience members as they exit the theaters. Nevertheless, Paramount Pictures, Aronofsky and his star Jennifer Lawrence have been trying their damnedest to defend this difficult experience, even as it’s been left hanging in the public square. But “Mother!” does have its fervent defenders. Some see it as a rich creation myth, while others enjoy it as a visceral display of blackly comic camp. I can see how these interpretations exist within the material but not necessarily how they redeem this messy passion project as a whole.  

Lawrence stars as the new wife of a much older poet played by Javier Bardem. They live secluded in the country where Bardem is trying hard to break his writers block, while Lawrence is rebuilding their home after a destructive fire. Their solitude is disrupted when a sick man played by Ed Harris and his wife played by Michelle Pfeifer wander into their lives and makes themselves comfortable. Just as things get awkward and their welcome becomes worn, more uninvited guests arrive and Lawrence’s character gradually begins to realizes that she has no control over the situation. Her sanity is further put to the test when the house itself seems like it's bleeding and responding physically to the emotional stress brought upon by these menacing guests and Bardem’s inability to recognize the problem at all.

That’s the simplest way to describe these events as they occur, but even this bare synopsis doesn’t do justice to the script’s wild arrangement. None of the characters have names and it becomes clear after twenty minutes or so that whatever we’re seeing is not to be taken literally. The movie itself is a poem, structured in stanzas instead of acts and with symbolic imagery standing in the place of plot points. Perhaps if audiences were warned of this before going in to see what was marketed as a psychological horror film, with a poster designed to evoke Polanski’s classic “Rosemary’s Baby,” they may have been more forgiving of Aronofsky’s indulgent storytelling. Then again, it’s also not hard to see how and why someone would lose patience with everything that's going on here.

When a film begs this hard to be asked what it’s actually about, the mind grasps for the nearest allegory. Is it a feminist story about the fears of domesticity? Is it about how celebrities are treated in the ever-present eye of the media? Is it about the complicated and sometimes exploitative relationship between an artist and his inspiration? Aronofsky himself has suggested that it’s an ecological allegory about man destroying mother-earth.  “Mother!” is about all of these things and nothing at the same time. As chaos mounts and tension builds within the contained interior setting of this country home, the movie’s meaning shifts and intensifies, sometimes focusing more on Lawrence’s fragile performance and other times on the broader big-picture stuff happening around her. The more broad and otherworldly things get the less of a handle the film has on its symbolism and more unintentionally funny it becomes.

While “Mother!” may go down as a “Heaven’s Gate” or “Ishtar” sized failure, there are reasons to see it and reasons to believe that, like those films, it may find an audience in the future.  Lawrence’s protagonist is put through almost Lars Von Trier levels of humiliation and abuse and it’s difficult to follow her journey, but her commitment to the picture, which is almost entirely from her perspective, is thoroughly grounded in textured emotion. Pfeifer’s comic timing and vampy presence also helps to alleviate some of the picture's heavy-handed self-importance. On a technical level, Aronofsky’s subjective camera work and the film’s many shocks certainly deliver, even if the end result is naval gazing, self-serving and aggravating to watch.

Grade: C-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2017

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "mother!" 

It review

A faithful adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 novel “It” has been a long time coming. Of course, there was the two-part miniseries that aired on network television in 1990, and though it hasn’t aged particularly well and was constrained from delving into most of the visceral terror described in King’s book, the series has its fans and Tim Curry’s performance as the evil clown Pennywise has become something of a cult-horror icon. The development of the first true cinematic adaptation of this novel has finally been realized by Argentinian director Andy Muschietti and with the help of New Line Cinema, this adaptation finally has the budget and the R-rating that it needs to realize this story with more creative freedom.

King has never been known for his brevity, but “It” stands as one of his largest and most ambitious works, containing over a thousand pages describing a group of bullied pre-teens who have to band together to kill the monster that’s been terrorizing their town of Derry, Maine. The book first tells the story of how the self-branded Losers Club meet while on their summer vacation, and then it revisits these same characters 27 years later, when they are forced to return to their hometown to once again destroy the evil entity they once thought was destroyed. For obvious reasons, Muschietti has decided to cut the story in half and streamline the remains, only concerning himself with the Loser’s as a kids, setting up a sequel for the adult half.  Here he does his best to balance their childhood traumas with that of their confrontations with the demented clown.

A group of child actors can always be mixed bag of performances and acting styles, but luckily for Muschietti, this cast has been assembled with care. Their reactions to the movie’s horrific imagery, as well as their perceived comradery as outsiders and friends is perfectly pitched. We’ve seen Jaeden Lieberher before in pictures such as “St. Vincent” and last year’s “Midnight Special,” but his performance here as Bill Denbrough steps up to the emotional weight of the character whose still mourning the murder of his younger brother Georgie. Finn Wolfhard, of the very King-esq Netflix series “Stranger Things,” also turns in a great performance as Richie, the group’s wise-cracker. The rest of the cast is a little less familiar, with Jeremy Ray Taylor as the overweight library geek Ben, Chosen Jacobs as the racially-targeted Mike, Wyett Oleff as the nervous Stanley, Jack Dylan Grazer as the hypochondriac Eddie, and Sophia Lillis as tough but fragile Beverly Marsh. The screenplay wisely gives each character enough screen time to build the necessary empathy and to underline the story’s dominant metaphors about over-coming childhood trauma.

As a horror film, this is somewhat conventional, but scary enough. Bill Skarsgard’s turn as Pennywise finds a delicate balance between mystery and menace, though it’s sometimes apparent that Muschietti leans into the devilish clown when he doesn’t know how else to build tension in a scene. As such, the more Pennywise is on screen the less we’re afraid of him. The scares are creative and sometimes intentionally blackly humorous—bringing to mind New Line’s flagship horror icon Freddy Krueger--but the film’s pacing, largely dictated by how and where the screenplay decides to skip around King’s tome of a novel, becomes repetitive and episodic towards the movie’s extended second act. All the important scenes are touched on and the book’s themes are still intact, but the rhythm of the film feels oddly metronomic and mechanical. The scares, while individually effective, sometimes cry for variation throughout.

As an adaptation, “It” has its problems, some structural, some tonal, but overall this is an imaginative and evocative horror film. What makes it stand outside of usual ghostly chiller that’s retreaded every year is the attention paid to its characters and their relatable woes as outsiders. The bullies and many of the adult roles lack the same amount of depth, but Muschietti’s sensitivity for his primary cast elevates and informs the movie’s broader monster shocks.

Grade: B

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2017

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "It."