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Mother! (2017)
As the director of The Wrestler and Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky has proven to be an artist of limitless style and imagination, but his imagination was in serious overdrive with a 2017 oddity called Mother!, a loopy psychological thriller that is mostly nonsensical and an ending that is a serious cop-out.
A writer (Jarvier Bardem) and his physically and emotionally fragile wife (Jennifer Lawrence) live in a large mansion in a secluded wooded area. They are cut off from traditional human existence until the appearance of a dying man (Ed Harris) who claims to be a fan of the writer and is invited to spend the night in the house. The next day the man's wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) shows up on our couple's doorstep along with their two sons, who begin an explosive confrontation that doesn't end well. In less than a blink of an eye, everyone who knows this family shows up at the house, making themselves more than at home. The wife is perplexed and aggravated about all these strangers being in her house, but it seems to have a profoundly positive effect on the writer.
They do manage to get this family out of their house long enough for the writer to get his wife pregnant. His wife's pregnancy inspires the writer to create something that makes him a contemporary Messiah that has thousands of people arriving at the house wanting a piece of him, his home, and his baby.
Like Donnie Darko and Hereditary, I have to file this movie under films that I just didn't understand. The second half of the film appears to be a contemporary re-thinking of Rosemary's Baby, and that's fine, but if that was the film's intention, then the first half with the dying man and his dysfunctional family made no sense. The point of all of these strangers invading their house and treating the wife like she was the unwelcome guest was awkward and squirm-worthy. There was this running routine of the wife having to tell people not to sit on a sink because it had not been properly braced that led to the expected destruction of said sink, but Aronofsky's attention to this plot point made it seem a lot more important than it actually was.
Aronofsky's direction is the best thing about this film...it's explosive and unpredictable and ferocious with a graduate course in the art of the hand-held camera, I just wish his screenplay had been a little more cohesive and brought certain plot points together a little more efficiently. There are scenes in the first act of the wife in the basement and the bathroom dealing with things like bleeding walls and tiny human fetuses that took too long to take their place in the story and the "and-then-I-woke-up" ending was a huge letdown.
Oscar winners Jarvier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence work very hard at making their roles credible, with Bardem particularly explosive and even though I didn't understand the character, I loved the icy bitch that Pfeiffer brought to the story, but this story was just a little too messy to completely invest in.
As the director of The Wrestler and Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky has proven to be an artist of limitless style and imagination, but his imagination was in serious overdrive with a 2017 oddity called Mother!, a loopy psychological thriller that is mostly nonsensical and an ending that is a serious cop-out.
A writer (Jarvier Bardem) and his physically and emotionally fragile wife (Jennifer Lawrence) live in a large mansion in a secluded wooded area. They are cut off from traditional human existence until the appearance of a dying man (Ed Harris) who claims to be a fan of the writer and is invited to spend the night in the house. The next day the man's wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) shows up on our couple's doorstep along with their two sons, who begin an explosive confrontation that doesn't end well. In less than a blink of an eye, everyone who knows this family shows up at the house, making themselves more than at home. The wife is perplexed and aggravated about all these strangers being in her house, but it seems to have a profoundly positive effect on the writer.
They do manage to get this family out of their house long enough for the writer to get his wife pregnant. His wife's pregnancy inspires the writer to create something that makes him a contemporary Messiah that has thousands of people arriving at the house wanting a piece of him, his home, and his baby.
Like Donnie Darko and Hereditary, I have to file this movie under films that I just didn't understand. The second half of the film appears to be a contemporary re-thinking of Rosemary's Baby, and that's fine, but if that was the film's intention, then the first half with the dying man and his dysfunctional family made no sense. The point of all of these strangers invading their house and treating the wife like she was the unwelcome guest was awkward and squirm-worthy. There was this running routine of the wife having to tell people not to sit on a sink because it had not been properly braced that led to the expected destruction of said sink, but Aronofsky's attention to this plot point made it seem a lot more important than it actually was.
Aronofsky's direction is the best thing about this film...it's explosive and unpredictable and ferocious with a graduate course in the art of the hand-held camera, I just wish his screenplay had been a little more cohesive and brought certain plot points together a little more efficiently. There are scenes in the first act of the wife in the basement and the bathroom dealing with things like bleeding walls and tiny human fetuses that took too long to take their place in the story and the "and-then-I-woke-up" ending was a huge letdown.
Oscar winners Jarvier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence work very hard at making their roles credible, with Bardem particularly explosive and even though I didn't understand the character, I loved the icy bitch that Pfeiffer brought to the story, but this story was just a little too messy to completely invest in.