Lawrence gets the chills in horror story ‘mother!’

Aronofsky’s film mind-bending weirdness

VENICE, Italy, Sept 5, (Agencies): Jennifer Lawrence’s new film, a horror story that escalates from menace to mayhem to mind-bending weirdness, has provoked strong reactions at the Venice Film Festival.

Darren Aronofsky’s “mother!” stars Lawrence and Javier Bardem as a couple living in that horror-flick staple, an isolated old house. They start to receive mysterious houseguests, with results that go from puzzling to apocalyptic.

The film, which Aronofsky describes as a “fever dream” provoked by angst at the state of the environment and society, was greeted with a mix of applause and boos at its first press screening in Venice.

It has its gala premiere Tuesday at the festival, where it is among 21 films competing for the Golden Lion prize.

If the only thing we wanted, or expected, a horror film to do was to get a rise out of you — to make your eyes widen and your jaw drop, to leave you in breathless chortling spasms of WTF disbelief — then Darren Aronofsky’s “mother!” would have to be reckoned some sort of masterpiece. As it is, the movie, which stars Jennifer Lawrence as a woman who slips down a rabbit hole of paranoid could-this-be-happening? reality (she flushes a beating heart down the toilet; blood melts through the floorboards; and oh, the wackjobs who keep showing up!), is far from a masterpiece. It’s more like a dazzlingly skillful machine of virtual reality designed to get nothing but a rise out of you. It’s a baroque nightmare that’s about nothing but itself.

Meaningful

Yet for an increasingly large swath of the moviegoing audience, that may be enough. “mother!” is often entertaining in a knowingly overthe-top, look-ma-no-hands! way. To ask for a film like this one to be more than it is — to ask for it to connect to experience in a meaningful way — may, at this point, seem quaint and old-fashioned and irrelevant.

Considering the number of cruddy recycled horror movies made by hacks that score at the box office, the film is almost destined to be a success, maybe even a “sensation,” because Aronofsky is no hack — he’s a dark wizard of the cinematic arts. Yet his two greatest films, “Requiem for a Dream” (2000) and “The Wrestler” (2008), are both steeped in the human dimension, whereas “mother!” is a piece of ersatz humanity.

Its dread has no resonance; it’s a hermetically sealed creep-out that turns into a fake-trippy experience. By all means, go to “mother!” and enjoy its roller-coaster-of-weird exhibitionism. But be afraid, very afraid, only if you’re hoping to see a movie that’s as honestly disquieting as it is showy.

In the remote green countryside, Lawrence plays the young second wife of a middle-aged celebrity author of feel-good poetry, played by Javier Bardem. (The characters are identified in the credits only as “mother” and “him.”) She’s renovating the couple’s exquisitely tasteful and spacious rustic historic mansion.

The place sits in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but grass and trees and wind, like a round-walled wooden country castle: no road, no driveway, no cell-phone service. It’s a house with great bones, as they say, but the place was burned in a fire, which destroyed everything Bardem had, including his first wife.

In the ashes, he found a burnished crystal, which gave him the faith to go on (it’s mounted in his study), and Lawrence wants to feel the faith too. She isn’t just fixing up a house; she’s restoring their lives.

That, however, is going to be a challenge, since Bardem, who has been a blocked writer ever since the fire, skulks around with knitted brows and a bitter scowl, treating Lawrence less as someone he loves than as the ball-and-chain he’s already sick of.

The oddest thing about “mother!” is that it pretends to be a “psychological drama,” but the Tensions Simmering Below The Surface are all on the surface. Aronofsky, who wrote as well as directed the film, seems to be drawing characters and situations out of a ham-handed tradition of overly blatant B-movie horror. But can intentional obviousness be an artful style? There’s no subtext to “mother!” — just the film’s hyper-synthetic, flattened-out pop reality.

Early on, there’s a mysterious knock on the door. It’s a skeevy and deranged-looking Ed Harris, who has somehow found his way vto the house, late at night, and acts oddly aggressive and familiar (to Bardem: “Your wife? I thought it was your daughter!”).

The even stranger thing is that within minutes, he and Bardem are sitting around like old drinking buddies, as if they were in the middle of a conspiracy. When Bardem invites him to stay over, Lawrence quite understandably says, “He’s a stranger. We’re not going to let him sleep in our house.” That Bardem treats a stranger like family and his wife like crap doesn’t really make sense, but the film asks us to accept that we’re in the “Twilight Zone” version of a “Green Acres” universe, where everything Lawrence thinks, says, and does is wrong, and she’s going to suffer for it, all because ... well, there is no because. All because that’s the movie’s sick-joke rules.