MOTHER OF ALL PIFFLE
There’s little to like in this pretentious movie from a director in love with himself . . . and his star and new squeeze Jennifer Lawrence
Cinematic marmite! that was the verdict on mother! following its premiere at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month. as in the case of the sticky brown yeast extract, we were told, film-goers would either love it or hate it.
Well, i can’t stand marmite, but i would rather eat a vat of the stuff than sit through Darren aronofsky’s wildly pretentious slab of selfindulgence again. it is not so much a movie, more an endurance test.
But let’s not overlook a genuine achievement on the part of the 48-year- old writer- director, whose last film, 2014’s noah, took liberties on a Biblical scale with the Old testament.
Until i saw mother!, i might have considered walking through fire to get into a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem and michelle Pfeiffer. So it’s an impressive trick to make me feel the same way about getting out.
Bardem plays a popular poet afflicted with debilitating creative block. neither he nor his much younger wife (Lawrence) is ever named. She is utterly in his thrall, and while he beats his brow in writerly angst, she makes a project of doing up their remote, rambling, spooky house.
this was also the home he shared with his first wife, until it was destroyed in a terrible fire. the only worthwhile thing he saved from the conflagration, which quite possibly consumed his first wife, too, was a giant shiny crystal, now displayed with great pomp in his study.
the poet’s other shiny trophy is his beautiful wife. in fact, their relationship rather evokes that of aronofsky himself and his much younger real-life girlfriend, none other than Jennifer Lawrence.
But only, let us hope, in terms of the generation gap. For this is not a marriage of equals, and after a visitor ( ed Harris) appears at their front door one night, it becomes clear that the poet does not much care about his wife’s sensibilities.
to her chagrin, he invites the stranger — who, horror of horrors, is a smoker — to stay the night.
the two men stay up drinking. Soon, the stranger’s nosy, catty wife (a nicely judged performance by michelle Pfeiffer) arrives, too, and immediately starts patronising her hostess.
LaWrence’S
hapless character, identified in the credits as the titular mother, is being gradually alienated in her own home. Yet her nightmare has barely begun.
the mysterious new couple’s two sons ( actual brothers Domhnall and Brian Gleeson) then turn up, only for one to kill the other in a fight.
the poet duly insists on hosting the wake, which degenerates into a chaotic party, with everyone treating the house as their own.
there is a brief respite when, to the joy of the poet and his wife, she gets pregnant. But the baby’s arrival is just another opportunity for further hordes of strangers, mostly crazed fans of the poet, to pour into the house.
this, in turn, yields a final act
that gets increasingly and bizarrely overwrought. I would call it surreal, except that surrealism is an art. Insane is a better word.
Some respected critics, with whom I saw this movie in Venice, have already anointed it with the full five stars.
It could be that they saw something I didn’t. But I prefer to think that I saw something they didn’t, namely a director so besotted with his own febrile imagination that he doesn’t really care whether he carries his audience with him or not.
In 2008’s The Wrestler and Black Swan (2010), Aronofsky stopped just short. But this time he genuflects fully to himself, and to hell with the rest of us. Does Aronofsky intend Mother! principally as a horror film, or a psychological thriller, or even as a satire on celebrity or on marriage?
It’s an unwieldy hybrid of all these, but horror cliches certainly loom large. For example, try as she might, Mother cannot scrub a growing blood stain off the lovely stripped floorboards.
In desperate search of light relief, I was tempted to cry that she should try a Miracle Mop. (Lawrence, you’ll recall, played the mop’s inventor very nicely in the 2015 movie Joy).
Here,
with her boyfriend’s camera trained on her almost the entire time, she unquestionably digs deep for the required tumult of emotions. But it is a wasted effort.
Mother! is horribly laboured, deeply tiresome and so bewildering that the title’s exclamation point, as the Americans call them, really should have been a question mark. The bigger question, though, is this: how many paying customers will sit through to the bitter end?
FroM the noisily ridiculous to the quietly sublime, My Pure Land might take some finding, but it is a small, low-budget gem of a movie, set in Pakistan. The producer is Bill Kenwright, much better known as a prolific theatre impresario (and chairman of everton FC), but he has been funding some really worthwhile films these past few years, none more so than this.
It tells a remarkable true story, that of a pair of teenage sisters, Nazo and Saeda, who showed extraordinary bravery in fighting off gangs of armed men trying to drive them from their rural home in a bitter land dispute between their father and his half-brother.
If John Ford or Howard Hawks had ever directed a western in Pakistan (which I suppose would make it an eastern), this is what it might look like.
It’s a tremendously accomplished debut feature by writer- director Sarmad Masud. But the other revelation is Suhaee Abro, a classical dancer here cast right out of her comfort zone as the exquisitely beautiful, formidably feisty Nazo. She is wonderful.
The film lurches back and forward in time, but both as a narrative and as an insight into another culture it is never less than engrossing. For instance, Nazo’s father has to sell a cow to pay for his lawyer, who then asks for more money to bribe the judge.
I don’t think that’s how they do it where I live in Herefordshire, but I’m just about to get sucked into a legal wrangle over property, so I’ll report back.