MOTHER!
Mother! is, instantly, one of cinema history’s most vivid nightmares. This is not to say that it’s a horror classic, or even a horror film. That it’s, even, particularly terrifying. What makes Darren Aronofsky’s seventh picture play like a nightmare is how much it feels like a dream.
It’s a film whose narrative progresses with a dream logic, whose terrors are entirely the anxieties of its heroine. Like the darkest recesses of a subconscious arising in one’s sleep, here we find Jennifer Lawrence, subjected to manifestations of her fears and preoccupations; unable to halt the barrage that starts out small, then only grows, and amplifies, into the wholly monstrous. Here, nothing feels fixed, permanent, or tangibly 'real'; instead, the story morphs and shifts, symbols shine bright, and meanings are multiple. Sometimes this seems like a shining vision, other times like just nonsense. This is the tenor of dreaming, turned cinematic spectacle; a grandstanding, unwavering nightmare from which the audience isn’t allowed the easy out of waking up.
Aronofsky has clearly taken influence from Roman Polanski’s classic early-period paranoia thrillers: his 'Apartment trilogy' of Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Tenant. Mother! takes place entirely in the one house: a giant, Gothic mansion standing in the middle of a field, in the middle of nowhere, completely removed from reality. It’s there that the film's unnamed protagonist, Jennifer Lawrence, lives with her partner, Javier Bardem, an older poet (called only, Him; every character herein unnamed) struck by writer’s block and filled with growing resentment.
Lawrence — trussed in white, barefoot, forever acquiescent to her temperamental, 'artistic' husband — is in the middle of lovingly renovating the house, which, we learn, previously burnt to the ground. She's, literally, a homemaker. One dark night, an ominous knock on the door leads to the arrival of Ed Harris; an evasive, untrustworthy figure; a supposed doctor who smokes, coughs, and retches, and a fan of Bardem's, who fawns over this 'great' man. Harris claims to be lost, Bardem asks him to stay, Lawrence feels railroaded; and, already, the unease sets in.
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More people show up: first comes Harris's wife, a brazen Michelle Pfeiffer, a trussed-up trophy wife who lacks tact and the ability to see personal boundaries. Then come their sons — played by real-life brothers Domhnall and Brian Gleeson— and, then, masses more. From our first arrivals on, it's a parade of entitled houseguests. Their sins start out slight: they don't mind their business, poke their noses in, go in rooms where they shouldn't. Then, the tide of people becomes an onslaught, the sanctity of private space obliterated; Lawrence left to protest in vain, wondering why no one will listen to her.
In these stretches, Mother! resembles something like a (nutty, admittedly) home-invasion thriller, in which an audience’s fears — of the sanctuary of home being sullied, domesticity disrupted, the fortress under threat — get manipulated. Usually, this set-up inspires some kind of dramatic defence of hearth and family by the protagonists, with the unwelcome guests beaten back, to the relief of the audience. But, here, the invading people’s disinterest in respecting property is echoed by Aronofsky; whose own disinterest is in giving viewers something so pat, so satisfying, so moral (in this way, I’m reminded of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, which Mother! resembles in its hostile, audience-riling subversion of this safe genre).
Instead, aside from a brief respite of domestic bliss when Lawrence falls pregnant (hence the title), the assault continues unabated, grows only more unsettling, violent, wild, hysterical. A new mob returns, even more entitled and vicious than the last, and soon the house is being torn apart; Lawrence forever ignored and dismissed, sidelined and silenced; both her house and her wishes trampled on.
The film is so unmoored from reality than it's clearly a parable in plural: for the parasitic way an artist treats their muse, for the way women are treated by society, for the way the environment is treated by humans, for the way celebrities are treated by the gossip industry.
But, mostly, Mother! plays like a grand cinematic penance, a public self-critique by Aronofsky, seemingly borne out of male-entitlement shame. Bardem’s character is a self-obsessed artist consumed only with his work, forever putting his relationship off to one side. He demands space in which he can work, and gets pissy when he's not tiptoed around. When fans flatter his ego, he swells inside. And when his work is successful, and beloved, he prefers the adulation of the masses as opposed to the love and support of a partner. If this relationship collapses, it's okay: as Great Male Artist, another doting figure can soon be found to start anew with; the whole cycle beginning again. (The fact that Aronofsky and Lawrence, older man and younger muse, became an off-screen item during the making of Mother! is a whole other art-imitates-life story.)
Aronofsky has turned the personal into grand, ridiculous cinematic dreams before, with 2006’s infamously-wonky The Fountain. With Lawrence somehow physically connected to the house herein — it is, in some ways, a living being — there’s hints of The Fountain's cockeyed eco-mysticism in Mother!. And, as goes Aronofsky’s familiar ways, there's also: inspiration drawn from Bible stories, super-shaky close-ups rattling a protagonist held captive by the frame, an overwhelmingly dark palette, and a narrative that descends into destruction, if not self-destructiveness.
Mother! is also, like most of his films, wantonly over-the-top; disorienting not only in narrative, but in how wildly it bucks beyond the regular restraints of studio cinema. For many viewers, this over-egged excess will all be too much: too unnerving, too ludicrous, too idiosyncratic, too horrifying.
Which, to me, makes Mother! a delight. Well, 'delight' is probably the wrong word, especially after you hear the phrase "die cunt!" yelled, herein, with due hostility, amidst a moment of gruesome violence. Too often movies are safe products of committee thinking, not only afraid of ruffling feathers, but desperately, cravenly out to flatter an audience.
In such a landscape, Mother! is an audacious, almost obnoxious exercise in subversion; a Trojan Horse being gleefully wheeled into multiplexes. It's a work of pure provocation, a sustained cinematic nightmare out to shake an audience from their slumber.
AMERICAN ASSASSIN
American Assassin opens with a trope that once would've lead a mid-period Arnold Schwarzenegger movie: a bro on beach holiday romantically proposes to his girl — a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white-bikini’d symbol-of-purity whose buxom bosom connotes both her sexual desirability and her maternal possibility — only to have this Hallmark moment turn tragedy. The girl says yes, only to be, moments later, gunned down by terrorists. It's the cheapest tool in the revenge-movie box: a wholesome tragedy that provides a moral pardon for our driven-man hero to shoot as many people, thereafter, as the story requires.
And, sure enough, after cradling his would-be-fiancée’s bloodied body in his arms for a Mendooozaaaaa-pullaway, Dylan O'Brien gets an '18 Months Later' intertitle, the interim having found him growing a beard, learning fluent Arabic, and training to become an unstoppable killing machine. He’s one righteous man-on-a-mission, until the CIA decides that they could use someone with his taste for righteous murder and devotion to the task, and brings him into the fold. It's cut-rate male fantasy fulfilment, replete with ninja throwing stars, MMA fighting, VR training sessions, and endless people in suits talking about how "special" this self-made man is. He's a lone wolf, a loose-cannon who doesn't play by the book ("bye book!"), but, by God, America needs him!
Which means, he’s given a hard-ass mentor (Michael Keaton, momentarily elevating awful material, and already cashing some post-Oscar paycheques), a partner who looks like an Instagram model (Shiva Negar), a villainous foil (Taylor Kitsch), a mission in Rome, 48 hours to save the day, an imminent Nuclear explosion, and a ticking clock countdown. When Michael Cuesta’s film gleefully plays with pulp action-movie clichés, there’s a minor pleasure to be had in its formulaic brainlessness. But there’s a dark undercurrent to American Assassin that feels repulsive: not only in the simple black/white of its All-American morality, but for how shamelessly it plays as armed-forces recruitment video.
PATTI CAKE$
Fear the Sundance crowdpleaser. Patti Cake$ delighted audiences — and inspired a studio bidding-war — when it premiered at Sundance back in January, but all this 'little film made good' publicity-narrative really means is that you're in for a formulaic genre-movie merely dressed in indie threads. Geremy Jasper’s debut flick has a strong sense of place, a memorable main character, and a sense of directorial verve; telling the tale of the titular rapper, a shit-outta-luck kid from a go-nowhere neighbourhood, who has dreams of making it, if only to make it out of Jersey, despite the fact that she’s both white and a woman, two traditional hip-hop no-nos.
Early on, as Jasper hits the beats of the genre, it seems like Patti Cake$ is going to have enough panache — and good enough music/rhymes — to succeed. But then, oh man, the hits just keep coming: the sickly grandmother who is surely going to die, the drunken mother who mocks her daughter's dreams, the hip-hop mogul who rejects her in a never-meet-your-heroes moment, the fight with the best-friend, the down moment where it rains and she throws all her old dreams in the bin, the spoken-out-loud laments ("I thought I could be someone"), the encouragement ("you have more talent and imagination in this little finger…") etc.
It's coming-of-age journey of self-discovery doubling as essential sports-movie, culminating in the big-grand-final type climax where everyone who ever doubted our heroine is under the one roof, and she's only got one shot, and can't miss her chance to blow, this opportunity only comes once in a lifetime, etc. It also proves a grand public forum for musical mother-daughter bonding, the healing of old wounds, catharsis, triumph, and the narrative to get wrapped up into the neatest little package. Whatever crowd such convention pleases, I don't wanna be a part of it.
