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!" 

Noah review

                Everyone knows the story of Noah and the great flood of The Bible, or at least they think they do.  Stories like this one and many others that have permeated the social sphere are usually not remembered, recited or quoted with accuracy or even with any of the relevant context to the scriptures that surrounds them. Instead, these tales have become a kind of cultural meme, and in the case of “Noah” over time the myth has been whittled down to the iconography of animals, rainbows and a big wooden boat. 

                New York filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, most well-known for his bleakly-pitched, visceral indie work like “Requiem for a Dream” and “Black Swan”, cares nothing about the memetic simplicity or even the moral dichotomies within the Noah story of the original biblical text.  With his recent adaptation—working within a much bigger budget than he’s usually afforded—he transgresses the familiar narrative in search for the darker implications of the legend.

                In this alternative universe version of “Noah” , Russell Crowe plays our hero as he is shown by the creator visions of a watery apocalypse that will destroy every living person in the world. His grandfather Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins) informs him that he has been called to save his family and the animalia of the planet by building a large ark that will float along the earth’s surface during the imminent flood. (Yeah yeah yeah—we know all that.) However, this time around, what Noah isn’t telling his family is that perhaps the creator never intended for the human race to survive past their death once they have saved the other species.  This becomes even more complicated when Noah’s adopted daughter Ila (Emma Watson) is struggling to bare children with his eldest son Shem (Douglas Booth), while at the same time his younger son Ham (Logan Lerman) is begging for a wife to validate his budding manhood.

                Much has been written about the fundamentalist reaction against Aronofsky’s additions to the source material, and it’s obvious within the first ten minutes that accuracy is not his aim. Much of the movie’s second half deals with the existential angst that these characters have to endure in the face of their seemingly elusive deity. Noah is forced to ponder if he was chosen because he’s the best of mankind or simply the best man for the job. The psychological weight this brings down on him and his family when they hear the screams outside of the arch as the flood rises around them exemplifies the universal truth of moral and spiritual uncertainty that this adaptation is interested in.  The disgruntled faithful should know that, as a story, the slanting of the text to better examine these characters and to give these actors more pathos to deal with is not where the movie fails…but this does lead me to my other point: rock monsters.  

                Maybe in a grand statement of defiance, or perhaps in a broad brushstroke of creative freedom, Aronofsky includes many Tolkien fantasy elements that unfortunately overpower the first half of this otherwise dark film with misjudged silliness. But besides scene-ruining rock monsters, Hopkins’ wizard-like Methuselah seems to serve more as a writing device than as a character, telling us what we already know or could gather from the plot, handing out magic-grow tree-seeds, and going on and on about berries.   Luckily the power and paranoia of the second half just barely saves the film from the Dungeons and Dragons nonsense of the first half. 

                I see no reason why details about the rather short biblical verses shouldn’t be altered for the sake of exploring characters and situations in a more complex or subversive way, even if the film’s pot boils over with too many discordant ideas from time to time. “Noah” is, without a doubt, an audacious and deeply melancholy cinematic experience, but it may alienate fans of the book.

Grade: C+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2014