The mother of a home invasion
Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer Be careful who you let into your life. YOU’RE not really guaranteed a fun night at the movies when you head out to catch the latest Darren Aronofsky film.
The acclaimed writer-director of Black Swan, The Wrestler and Requiem for a Dream tends to tackle fun topics like obsession, addiction, paranoia and mania in his films, usually in ways that redefine the word “intense”.
And while he may not be a barrel of monkeys, Aronofsky has earned a reputation as an accomplished, intelligent and emotionally attuned filmmaker, not to mention one with a talent for drawing great performances from his actors (Natalie Portman won an Oscar for her work in Black Swan; Mickey Rourke should have won one for The Wrestler).
Any good artist, especially one with a few critical and commercial successes to their credit, has perhaps earned the right to go off the rails a little.
With his new film mother! (yes, the lower-case m and the exclamation mark are intentional), Aronofsky goes off the rails a lot. With mixed results.
There’s some breathtaking filmmaking here when it comes to the establishment and escalation of unease — unease that mutates into confusion, dread, mayhem and chaos.
Jennifer Lawrence sets the pace in an incredibly demanding role.
She plays the mother of the title (she’s never given another name), the young wife of a famous writer (credited as Him and played by No Country for Old Men’s Javier Bardem) who is struggling to create his latest work.
Selflessly providing love and support by restoring their damaged country house into a warm, welcoming home, she is put out when a man (Ed Harris) shows up unannounced and is offered a room for the night by her husband.
The next morning, a woman (Michelle Pfeiffer, hard and brilliant as a diamond) — the man’s wife — shows up and makes herself just as home.
Then the couple’s squabbling sons show up. And that is only the beginning of an invasion of privacy that starts as an inconvenience and gradually spirals into outright insanity.
mother! has made much of keeping its plot points a mystery, so I won’t reveal just what the carnage that envelopes Lawrence’s character represents or just how far it goes. But it does go pretty far, far enough to disturb and even distress, and Aronofsky’s depiction of the descent into anarchy has a disorienting, hypnotic effect. That’s intended as a compliment, by the way.
However, once you twig to what this anarchy symbolises, it’s hard not to feel a slight sense of disappointment, as if a great deal of effort has gone into making a fairly obvious point.
But a film with this kind of full-bore fervour in its ideas and execution is something to be admired, if not necessarily embraced.