mother! (2017)

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Screenplay: Darren Aronofsky

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence as mother; Javier Bardem as Him; Ed Harris as man; Michelle Pfeiffer as woman; Domhnall Gleeson as oldest son; Brian Gleeson as younger brother

[Full Spoilers Throughout]

I wrote, on my Letterboxd page, that I would never watch another Darren Aronofsky film. I will add two caveats now, and least I be viewed a hypocrite, this is why I rarely due snap judgements after viewing a film, as inevitably I Will think with more consideration about what I saw even if the original judgement call is the same. What I have to bear in mind is that 1) I might revisit The Wrestler (2008), his most grounded work. And 2), the man who made Pi (1998) is a very different figure than the one who made mother!. If the man who made Pi returns I might see his films again. As I wrote before, none of Aronofsky's work between is of interest for me - overrated, unsubtle, or with Noah (2014) a headache. I fully believe mother!, whose title immediately evokes a Jeeves and Wooster story that should have been written, is the artistic statement so misguided Aronofsky effectively shot himself in the head on-film. Ambition is usually to be admired, even failing, but this film's entire ethos in its style and message is from the start an entire moral failure. Those who despised mother! will be glad to know this is a shooting fish in a barrel scenario, where I pick up a rifle and join in. Those who liked mother! I apologise to immediately, as this review is going to get ugly quickly.

The P. G. Wodehouse reference is apt, as is Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel (1962) if the guests refused to leave rather than couldn't, a sitcom narrative where an egotistical writer (Javier Bardem) refuses to listen to his younger wife (Jennifer Lawrence) when he lets random strangers stay with them. It's a comedy premise written by some who however is using this idea to house Old and New Testament symbolism, which is where immediately the problems lie. The film is disconnected in its various themes which never fully connect, starting as a situational drama but becoming body horror, than psychological drama, than fully embracing the religious overtones just in the first hour. It is not fleshed together well - not able to connect the styles properly like the likes of Andrzej Zulawski could because there is both no risk, all that Aronofsky depicts onscreen a cliché, and no emotional connection that allows the subversion of genre and expectations to work.

The religious imagery in particular is in the centre of the work's clear lack of focus. I came into mother! knowing very well its plot structure is based on the Bible. That Bardem's author is God, Ed Harris as Adam, Michelle Pfeiffer as Eve, and their sons Cain and Abel making a cameo. Automatic problems arise in that their characters gel badly to their portrayal, as a story of a writer whose hubris willing sacrifices his wife's happiness contrasts in its presentation to a story of humanity and God from the beginning. The idea of a whole planet's Christian chronology being represented in one house not a bad idea but one failed because Aronofsky both skims over details and is also failing to actually tackle the Bible in a way that feels cohesive, coming off instead as a badly read interpretation. When Noah's flood is depicted by a leaking sink pipe, and it is not shot in a way that is delicately humorous, there is a misreading on hand before you get to the more problematic takes on religion that come. This does not even get into the idea that Jennifer Lawrence is meant to be Mother Nature, not an issue for myself to co-exist with the Christian deity but definitely an issue when said figure of Nature is such a wet, insignificant one.

The performances, barring Pfeiffer in a brief role, are terrible. The characters are walking symbols, at odds when characters have to be fully fleshed for the psychological horror at hand too. Lawrence is the worst as she has been forced to act like a walking board of wood, dressed and filmed in a way by her then-boyfriend Aronofsky which that is utterly embarrassing as a professional performer, a subservient housewife figure who is a very sexist depiction for any actress to play. It is also deeply incongruous to the film's environmental side as for a depiction of Mother Nature, completely alien to what Nature is both in perceived surroundings and spiritual. That there are only a few scenes actually showing the outside world, all CGI riddled splurge, and that the only form of strength shown close to the real power of the natural world is the sort of superpower from an X-Men movie.

The overall aesthetic of mother! is also some of the worst I've seen in a mainstream Hollywood film for a while, a new nadir in all the creative decisions I hate in current filmmaking. Turgid, lifeless colour palette of browns and greys like many films of the 2010s, lulling the viewer into a stupor. Gallingly people have referenced the likes of Hieronymus Bosch in references to this film's aesthetic to which they need a history lesson of Christian art. From the reds of Bosch's hell to the green Satan of Michael Pacher's The Devil holding up the book of Vices to St. Augustine, the Bible is a vast colourful spectrum in both its Hell as much as Heaven. There is not even a sense of actual space and environment to the house this story is set in, because the camera is usually close-up to Lawrence thus preventing the viewer establishing shots to take in this generic country home as a space to represent the Earth and its occupants. Neither was it a good idea to not use a score, a decision which instead saps tension from the images further.

When the film reaches full blown religion horror, it collapses completely. Surrealism is at one end, an important allegory at the other, and mother! misses both by a country mike. A home which has a heart in its walls but never defines said home as a character in itself, an organism with weight to it. A heart in the toilet is just a disconnected shock. The glowing yellow liquid Lawrence takes to calm herself is never something even as a surreal inclusion instead, practically fairy dust and urine for all the viewer knows. The subject of the egotistical writer clashes with this fully bizarre middle and final act is lost as a simplistic idea, the environmental message so painfully obvious it is a sketch show parody of an environmental allegory movies. The religious imagery, as the writer's fans start to become a religion surrounding him, is so heavy handed it is not passable critique for religion. In fact watching a film like this regardless of my own beliefs or even yours as a reader, its evidence to how utterly loathsome and eye rolling critiques of organised religion are in any medium now, feeling less like the necessary critiques of a century ago but the collective works of immature teenage nihilists. Immature people who are just trying to offend for the sake of their own egos, worst as it never feels like the work of people who have actually thought long and hard on their own beliefs, or bothered to even attempt to read any religious text beyond just Christian ones.

mother! skims over its religious material so much you actually end up with legitimately offensive moments, so broad not only the Christians have a right to be angry but even atheists should be as well, as the hellscape the house becomes is affectively the skeptic's version of a Evangelical hell house. Hell houses for the unknowledgeable are alternative Halloween haunted houses showing the sins that one has to repent for, unsubtle and offensive to outsiders in many cases for what they depict. mother! final act is a hell house just as liable to offend intelligent viewers, as amongst its thrill ride of mankind's worst acts you have a female sex slavery in one room, with stereotypical mobsters who speak in another language meant to evoke Eastern European gangsters, and in another genocide in which people have bags put on their heads and shot. All like the stereotypical image of a hell house without subtlety, and not even the context no matter how offensive they can be of the Evangelical ones. Somehow Aronofsky justifies for me a little why the term "Hollyweird" exists for liberal Hollywood, because his depiction of human beings as merely the fleas on Earth rather than capable of transcendence manages to even offend a spiritual agonist with liberal ideals like me.

Then you get to the baby. Considering it is clearly Jesus Christ, despite Lawrence being Mother Earth and clearly not the Virgin Mary, I did suspect Aronofsky would go as far as having a crucified baby on a cross and be that stupid. Somehow he managed worse. It is at first unintentionally hilarious as, perfectly described in the review on 366WeirdMovies.com, you see a "crowd surfing baby", one of the worst CGI creations I have seen on top of a crowd of extras like we have ended up at a Metallica concert. Then, after killing the child, said extras eat said baby's corpse. It is a moment that has been too much for many, and as someone who became an uncle for the first time in the year when mother! was unleashed into the world, my perception of child death in cinema is going to be complicated. That is not the reason why it sinks the film into the trash however. It is that this is clearly meant to represent the Eucharist when it does, when at the Last Supper Christ said to his followers his body was the bread and his blood the wine, the moment that the border between a critique in religion and full extreme belligerence against notions of human decency takes place. A moment of moral reprehensible behaviour in making a film, an argument that even transgression in art should always have a morality to it. Even Buñuel's more blaspermpus moments treated religion with complexity and was more vendictive on the likes of priests instead. This moment in mother! is when Aronofsky may have made one of the worst films I have seen in the 2010s even if technically competent.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Mindbender/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Personal Opinion:

A pretentious, miserable and utterly irredeemable failure. One of the more insulting films I have seen from the 2010s and I was even prepared for its more notorious aspects ahead of time. And the part that I fear will happen is that people will point to the film as a great canonical work of surrealism and transgressive art. No matter how elitist this may sound, I suspect that some of the people who do so could have not been bothered to watch a good film like Un Chien Andalou (1929) even if on YouTube, letting this failure on many levels have credit when Aronofsky should be barred from making more films like this unless he had a drastic revaluation of his ethics. If mother! somehow manages to develop a cult in the next twenty years, I could turn into an Armond White figure quicker than sooner due to the utter misguided celebration of this embarrassment.