Trouble in paradise for artist and muse
A movie for the difficult domestic partner in all of us, “Mother!” will surely blow some people’s minds while alienating a healthy share of moviegoers just for sport, the way the hit of the moment, “It,” wouldn’t be caught dead trying.
Paramount Pictures can try to make “Mother!” look like a straight-up horror film all it likes. But at heart it’s a wormy, increasingly outlandish portrait of a creative artist in torment, hard to live with when suffering from writer’s block and considerably worse after it passes.
In earth tones and paranoiac increments, writer-director Darren Aronofsky delivers a damning critique of the artist-muse arrangement, even as he admits to its old-fashioned patriarchal simplicity. As tough as Aronofsky’s being on himself here, while whipping up a pretty interesting fever dream of a movie, he appears to be sorting through some personal relationship matters throughout. As one critic said coming out of the Chicago screening: It’d be interesting to hear a Blu-ray commentary track from Aronofsky’s ex, Rachel Weisz.
Aronofsky and his “Mother!” leading lady, Jennifer Lawrence, are now a couple, so that’s bound to stoke an extra element of interest in the film. Like Mia Farrow in “Rosemary’s Baby,” Lawrence is the audience conduit here, reacting (though without Farrow’s bug-eyed hysterics; Lawrence’s eyes do not bug) to the escalating weirdness in and around a couple’s old farmhouse under renovation after a mysterious fire. The house sits in the middle of a bucolic nowhere. This is Eden, “Flip or Flop” division.
Nobody has first or last names in Aronofsky’s elemental fairy tale. Lawrence plays “Her,” or “Mother,” the wife, the poet’s muse and the domestic goddess, creating, as she says, a “paradise” for their life together. This is the first of many biblical inferences in “Mother!”
He, or “Him,” is played by Javier Bardem. The opening minute puts him in the power position: We see a woman, burning alive; a charred house; a diamond pulled from the ashes and placed, by Bardem, on a display stand. What is this shiny thing?
Then we’re into the story proper. It’s morning. Things are cordial but a little off with Him and Her. He’s preoccupied with the work he isn’t doing and hasn’t shown any interest in lovemaking lately. “You’ve been working so hard,” she says, sympathetically but warily. “Yeah, right,” he replies.
An unexpected visitor arrives, played by Ed Harris. He’s looking for a bed-and-breakfast. There’s a hospital nearby; this man claims to be a doctor. The character seems to have wandered over from an Edward Albee play. (“Mother!” plays like a mashup of “A Delicate Balance” and “The Play About the Baby,” thrown into a farmhouse edition of “Rosemary’s Baby.”) The man turns out to be an ardent fan of the husband’s published poetry. Michelle Pfeiffer soon appears at the front door as the visitor’s tart-tongued, callously inquisitive wife. She’s very funny here; it’s her best role and best work in years.
More strangers arrive. The grown sons of the characters played by Pfeiffer and Harris, played by real-life brothers (Domhnall and Brian Gleeson), appear one after the other, squabbling over a family will, complaining about who loved whom more from the beginning. (Bible reference alert!) From there we’re in full-on spoiler territory, though “Mother!” can’t be described as a mystery exactly; it’s a sweaty depiction of a relationship coming apart in nervously compressed, speeded-up time.
Visually, the movie stays close to Lawrence’s face (in close-up for roughly half of the slightly protracted two-hour running time). Aronofsky and his ace cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, counter the close-ups with behind-the-shoulder shots — you may remember the technique from Aronofsky’s most conventional picture, “The Wrestler,” with Mickey Rourke — restricting our point of view so that we see what the wife sees, in little swish pans left and right. When the guests start arriving, we never get a consistent sense of where they are in the old house, or what they’re up to.
I’d see “Mother!” again just for sound designer Paula Fairfield’s array of whooshing and whumping noises, accentuating every door that opens and closes. Editor Andrew Weisblum sharpens the edges of even the simplest dialogue sequences, though much of the film ditches dialogue.
Aronofsky wrote the script in a quick burst, and it plays that way. He’s enough of a writer to send his angst flying in all directions. The movie is grandiose and narcissistic and, in quick strokes, pretty vicious. In his biggest hit to date, “Black Swan,” the fantasy/ reality games were nice and simple: Is the ballerina imagining things or not? “Mother!” starts that way but goes crazier.
The poster image for “Mother!” depicts Lawrence’s face as a disintegrating statue, a mythical Galatea to Bardem’s Pygmalion. I’m not sure whether the movie is a love letter or a write-off, but Lawrence and company inhabit the florid absurdity with fierce commitment. The inevitable disappointing CinemaScore exit polls aside, it’s worth seeing, if you don’t mind a little insanity in escapism that offers no escape, only the promise of a new fairy tale on another page.