Mommy
Xavier Dolan (2014)
Reviewing Un homme et une femme in 1966, Pauline Kael wrote that ‘the worst thing … is that its director, Claude Lelouch, is so young. His assurance and facility are indications that he’s already found his style, and, no doubt, he will take this financial and prestigious success as encouragement’. Lelouch was twenty-eight when Un homme et une femme won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and it was his seventh feature film in as many years. As I recall, I thought the worst thing about Un homme et une femme, by a wide margin, was Francis Lai’s score but, like many of Pauline Kael’s words, these ones have stuck in my mind more than the film she was writing about. I was reminded of them after watching Mommy, the Grand Jury Prize (joint) winner at Cannes in 2014 and the fifth feature since 2009 by the French Canadian Xavier Dolan, who turned twenty-six earlier this month.
I’ve not seen Dolan’s previous films but Mommy, which he also wrote, is a remarkably confident piece of work. A prologue situates the story in a very imminent future, explaining that, following a change of law in the light of the Canadian federal elections of 2015, parents are permitted to have their mentally ill children institutionalised without the child’s consent. Mommy begins with a (well-staged) car crash, involving two vehicles. The male driver of one is unscathed. He’s fearful that the other driver has been seriously hurt but she emerges more angry than injured. (She’s bleeding from what looks like a nasty cut on her head but the wound is superficial.) This woman is Diane (Die) Després, a middle-aged widow, who is en route to the youth detention centre, where her teenage son Steve is currently a resident. Steve suffers from severe ADHD and is prone to violent outbursts – the latest of these has caused a fire in a cafeteria at the centre, in which another boy has been badly burned. The centre authorities aren’t prepared to look after Steve any longer. Die has the choice of either agreeing his transfer to a secure unit or looking after him herself. She takes her son home.
Die’s home-schooling plans for Steve are irreconcilable with her needing to get work to pay the bills. She loses her job shortly after Steve comes back to live with her, tries unsuccessfully to get some translating work and soon has no option but to join a house-cleaning outfit. Kyla, a woman who lives opposite Die and Steve, is a high-school teacher, on extended leave of absence because of a bad stutter that she’s developed. Right from the start of their acquaintance, Steve likes Kyla, and she and Die like each other. Kyla starts tutoring Steve and things are looking up for all concerned until the parents of the boy injured in the cafeteria fire serve a writ on Die, claiming hefty compensation. Die turns to another neighbour, a lawyer called Paul, a lonely man who’s asked her out a couple of times but who she’s turned down until now. Paul is naturally more than happy to help but when he, Die and Steve go out together for an evening, it’s a disaster: the boy has what Richard Brody (one of the few critics to have reviewed Mommy negatively) accurately describes as ‘an Oedipal freakout’. From this point onwards, it’s clear that Die’s attempts to hold on to Steve are doomed. He suffers a crisis of insecurity about his mother’s love and loyalty, and slashes his wrists. Die decides to sign Steve over to the care of a secure detention centre, for what she reluctantly accepts is her son’s own good.
Mommy, which runs 138 minutes, is much too long but continuously absorbing. Xavier Dolan establishes, very quickly, a momentum which he sustains throughout. The film received a thirteen-minute standing ovation at Cannes and I can understand why: it’s emotionally very effective. You can’t help being struck by Dolan’s film-making brio even though you can’t ignore either Mommy’s lack of underlying intelligence and insight. Much of the time, Dolan uses a very distinctive aspect ratio: the action is framed in a square – postage stamp rather than letterbox. The square is an obvious reflection of the main characters’ boxed-in situation: once this message is received, the technique is – until you’ve got so used to it that you no longer notice it – merely irritating. Occasionally, the image widens across the otherwise black areas of screen to illustrate the possibility of freedom or, at least, change in the principals’ lives. An instance of this occurs at the peak of the growing, productive relationships of Die, Steve and Kyla. The two women are riding cycles along the road. Steve runs ahead of them, and the other traffic, pushing a supermarket trolley. As he chucks items of food from the trolley into the path of the cars behind, he exults, ‘I’m free!’, and Die and Kyla both laugh happily. The moment is recalled in the final scene of Mommy: in the secure unit, the guards are briefly distracted as they unfasten Steve’s straitjacket and he breaks free, racing down the corridor – in slow motion – with the staff in pursuit. This calls to mind the ending of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest specifically and, in combination with the ‘I’m free!’ moment, reminds you of the persisting tendency of films of recent decades to present mental disturbance as a state of enhanced countercultural liberation.
The aetiology of Steve’s ADHD and Kyla’s ‘language problem’ are, similarly, reminders of movie formulae used to explain psychological and psychosomatic problems. Steve, Die tells Kyla, seemed no more than ‘hyperactive’ as a child; his disorder became more serious in the wake of his father’s death. (It’s not clear whether the worsening of Steve’s condition is meant to be read as an expression of Oedipal guilt at his father’s death or as the result of ‘simple’ grief.) Kyla is married with a young daughter but she’s evidently unhappy at home. As she engages more with Steve, her stutter virtually disappears. When things go back downhill, it returns. (Dolan skates over the reactions of her husband and, especially, her child to the increasing time that Kyla devotes to Steve and Die but, in one of the camera’s few visits inside Kyla’s home, I thought I saw photographs of a small boy – is this a son Kyla has lost?) Some of the plotting is not so much wobbly as brazenly improbable. Why does Die decide that Steve, who’s already jeered at Paul’s wanting to get off with her, should accompany them on their business-and-pleasure outing? The answer is so that Xavier Dolan can make a melodramatic highlight of the occasion. (He appears to forget about the lawsuit after this episode.)
It’s clear from an early stage that Dolan has a penchant for showing characters in (often slowed-down) movement to music. The soundtrack includes apt, emotionally expressive accompaniments to themes and developments in the narrative (Dido’s ‘White Flag’, Oasis’s ‘Wonderwall’): the matching of song and action on screen creates sequences that are almost like numbers in a musical. They tend to be overlong and self-indulgent but one sequence, in which the music is chosen by Steve and discussed by him, Die and Kyla (rather than imposed on the action by Dolan), works very well. This is due entirely to the visual and sonic dynamic – the meaning of the sequence comes across too loud and clear – but, when the three main characters, in Die’s kitchen, dance and sing along to Celine Dion’s ‘On ne change pas‘, it transmits a sense of Steve’s calming down and Kyla’s loosening up in a way that’s immediately hard to resist. When Die, Steve and Paul go out together, a karaoke sequence demonstrates more extensively the writer-director’s signature: it’s a shoddy conception transmuted, by a clever use of music and good acting, into something that nearly works. Dolan telegraphs, through repeated cuts to clichéd clenched hands etc, that Steve is going to explode (and he does) – but the boy’s ‘Oedipal freakout’ is leavened by his choice of karaoke number, the sweetly romantic Andrea Bocelli song ‘Vivo per lei’. There’s real sadness in Steve’s inept singing, as he watches his mother – who’s not watching him but getting drunk, and relaxing, with Paul.
The acting, in the main parts anyway, is way ahead of the script. Antoine-Olivier Pilon, sixteen when the film was made, is a tremendous presence: he makes Steve’s alarming mood switches seem powerfully natural; both his use of his large features and his line readings are very witty. Steve is attractive and he’s physically intimidating: Dolan’s dramatisation of these qualities, in Steve’s interactions with both his mother and Kyla, provides some of Mommy‘s strongest moments. There are times when hyperactivity verges on the epidemic in this film as a result of overacting in small roles. The administrator in the youth detention centre, the malignant boss who fires Die, another woman she knows and turns to, in desperation, for work – the actresses in these parts would all be more effective if they were more matter of fact. The garrulous energy of Anne Dorval as Die is something else: it’s as if Die is both infected by Steve’s behaviour and, sometimes, keen to get onto his wavelength in order to feel solidarity with her son. (You also feel that Die has to keep moving and talking to take her mind off the grim situation she and Steve are in: the metal necklace that Die wears, which reads ‘Mommy’, is an albatross.) The character of Kyla is pretty limited: it’s not surprising that Suzanne Clément can’t be wide-ranging in the role although she plays it with commitment. Patrick Huard has a sure, nuanced touch as the awkwardly ingratiating Paul. The English subtitles’ rendering of the Québecois vernacular – heavy on profanity and hip-hop speak – is hard going at first: the frequent elisions (‘d’ya see’, ‘ll right’, and so on) seem particularly laborious. The conscientious subtitling is eventually justified, though – for example, in conveying Paul’s hopeless attempts to sound cool.
Mommy seems about to end then decides not to several times. (The film would have been tougher and arguably more persuasive if Steve’s suicide attempt had succeeded.) It’s a considerable relief when one of the false endings – Steve’s growth into a stable, conventional, happy adult life – is revealed as a fantasy in his mother’s mind. The ‘grown-up’ Steve in this sequence is so blandly handsome, such a reduction of the character that Antoine-Olivier Pilon has realised, that you experience something approaching horror at Steve’s normalisation – it’s hard to credit that Die, who’s fully aware of her difficult son’s charisma, would entertain such a fantasy. (This montage of Steve’s getting into college and graduating and getting married is unfortunately similar to the ‘Celebrating Fifty Years of Family’ commercial for Kentucky Fried Chicken, currently among the Pearl and Dean ads at Curzon cinemas and therefore on the screen immediately before Mommy.) Xavier Dolan looks to be trying out endings and deciding against them until he finds one that will deliver emotionally and send the audience out on a momentary high. Steve’s escape from the straitjacket certainly fits the bill.
24 March 2015