Directed by: Darren Aronofsky
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer, Kristen Wiig
You know you've had a bad movie week when IT was the only the second-worst movie you saw. I thought after a while mother! was a goof; an extreme satire of horror films in which the protagonists' home is a.) a conduit to hell or b.) hell itself. But, no, I believe this finished product is serious. It is the kind of film you see in the movies which causes studio executives to sit in dumbfound silence, wondering just what exactly the heck they are watching. In the movies, the exec would angrily order the director to be fired. In the case of this film, it seems the director was encouraged to keep it up, whatever it was he was trying to do.
Where do I begin? Writing this review is like sifting through the ashes of a massive explosion trying to determine what caused it. The frustrating thing about mother! (yes, that is how I'm supposed to write the title) is that for the first half-hour or so, there is generated suspense even though the opening scenes of the movie pretty much foreshadow the ending. I read how the characters don't have names, which I absolutely detest in any movie. Why can't the wife (Lawrence) have a first name? Why can't the husband/poet (Bardem)? How do they go through an entire movie without mentioning each other by name? How do the creepy houseguests (Harris and Pfeiffer) descend on Lawrence's tranquil home without ever being asked their names?
It gets far worse. Anyhow, Mr. and Mrs. Poet have a house in the middle of absolute nowhere. It appears there aren't even roads around. mother! takes place entirely within the home, which is being renovated painstakingly by Lawrence as her husband deals with a severe case of writer's block. He was once a writer of some stature, it seems, but now he can't seem to write a word. The age difference between the spouses is noted by Pfeiffer, who shows up on the scene as a very rude, forward houseguest. The houseguests appear out of nowhere, Harris is supposedly stranded, with Bardem welcoming them with entirely too much trust and familiarity while Lawrence very reasonably wonders what the strangers are up to.
Without going into too much mind-numbing detail, let's just say more uninvited guests show up, things get crazy, a bloody confrontation ensues, and soon Lawrence is left at home by herself where she discovers the house may be a cousin of the one in Amityville Horror. Why she didn't take this opportunity to head for the hills is one of many, many questions left unanswered. Anyhow, more people show up at the house and wreck the place, made worse by Bardem's acceptance of this abhorrent behavior. Lawrence's response to watching her dream house turned into utter shambles by strangers is in the form of maddeningly meek protests. At first, we can feel sorry for her, but her passivity soon makes us impatient and angry at her. Will she please develop a backbone already and tell the interlopers and her hubby to hit the road?
What is odd is how once Harris and Pfeiffer leave the scene, they are never seen again and their whole odd episode is never mentioned again. After a few months of relative peace, Bardem sells a manuscript and before a quiet night at home, more strangers appear at the house which are welcomed by the egotistical Bardem, but not by Lawrence, and now we have Lawrence telling the strangers to get out of her room and stop jumping on the furniture 2.0. Then, the movie really, really flies off the rails, as the gathering grows into a night of terror and madness with the dolt Lawrence sticking around way, way too long before trying to escape. I can't imagine hell being much worse than what is depicted in mother!
What starts as lower scale horror and suspense soon escalates into an all-out assault on the senses with a payoff that doesn't reward us for our patience. It's as if Aronofsky was playing a cruel joke on the audience. We think all of this has some kind of salient point, but the ending doesn't justify it. Much, too much, is unexplained or senseless. Characters are introduced, built up, and then forgotten in the morass of nonsense. And don't give me the whole "Aronofsky leaves it vague so we can figure it out for ourselves" cop out. I'm not entirely sure Aronofsky himself knows what he is trying to show. The entire enterprise is one in which control was completely lost and we feel as if are swimming in quicksand trying to figure it out.
The film is not a highlight in the careers of the cast involved. Lawrence is a very good actress, but she is not capable of rescuing the film from the depths, especially playing a woman so meek and passive we want to shake her to snap out of it. The poet does not exhibit any reason whatsoever to convince us why Lawrence has such undying devotion to him. He is a monosyllabic egomaniac who disregards his wife's feelings in favor of selfishly entertaining the guests who cater to his ego. There is barely any conversation between them. Something tells me if the evil guests didn't show up, these two would just stare at each other in nervous silence trying to discuss the weather. The film is so slow to reveal its true nature, and even then we don't know if it truly does, that we simply grow impatient and frustrated.
Aronofsky's last movie was Noah (2014), which is a Best Picture winner compared to mother! This film is more akin to the director's Black Swan (2010), about a ballet dancer's descent into madness which won a Best Actress Oscar for Natalie Portman. mother! is Black Swan on steroids with the wattage cranked up until we achieve sensory overload. This is not a good thing. mother! turns into a full-fledged disaster which runs an obscene two hours long. During Lawrence's tour of her basement, in which she discovers blood seeping from the walls and hears a faint heartbeat within the cement, I thought of Eddie Murphy's line from his standup act where he says, "Why don't white people get out of the house when there's a ghost in the house?" She doesn't heed Murphy's advice and pays the price. So do we.
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