Mother!
Darren Aronofsky (2017)
There were plenty of personal prejudices to subdue. This is a film whose title ends in an exclamation mark (and even begins with a lower-case letter but let’s ignore that, as IMDB does). Its principal characters, nameless in the action, are listed in the cast as Mother and Him. The plot involves surprise visitors to a private house making themselves at home and wreaking havoc. The director (and writer) is Darren Aronofsky.
Mother! is a horror mystery in which, according to IMDB, ‘A couple’s relationship is tested when uninvited guests arrive at their home, disrupting their tranquil existence’. But Aronofsky is too impatient to bother with suspense: the existence of Mother (Jennifer Lawrence) and Him (Javier Bardem) is never tranquil. In his first appearance on screen, Him places a multi-faceted piece of crystal on display and observes it with enigmatic satisfaction – a reliably bad sign. Mother is uneasy from the moment she wakes alone in bed and calls out for Him. The interior lighting is glum and the camera prowls ominously round the place. The homestead, of course, stands in the middle of nowhere: Mother gets up and stands at an open door, looking out at an appealing gold and green landscape distant enough to appear utterly inaccessible. When the couple converse Him’s smiling reassurance seems automatic and phony. Within a few screen minutes, Mother is seeing things that disturb her outside and inside the house, including a heart beating within a wall. The often hand-held camera is oppressively tight on the characters’ faces, to claustrophobic effect. In short, there’s no domestic bliss for malign forces either external or internal to destroy.
Him is a famous poet suffering from writer’s block. Mother is doing up their big, empty house. (Even the sounds of plaster being mixed and applied to a wall are doom-laden.) Him explains to their first caller, Man (Ed Harris), that he (Him) lost everything when his previous home burned down. All that survived the inferno was that piece of glassy crystal. Then Mother entered Him’s life and restored his happiness. We can be confident from this point onwards – especially since Aronofsky preceded the first shot of Him and crystal with a close-up of a woman’s burning face – that the narrative is going to be cyclical. We can be sure too, from the moment Him asks Man not to touch the crystal, that the house guests – Man is soon followed by his wife Woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) – will break it. Him’s nervousness about the precious object is the only thing that qualifies his warm welcome of the unexpected arrivals. Mother, in contrast, is immediately wary of them and, in due course, vindicated. Man is a chain smoker with a shocking cough to prove it and, Him tells Mother, not long to live. Man and Woman have two sons. Younger Brother (Brian Gleeson) arrives, in a panic, jabbering about a disputed will; disinherited Oldest [sic] Son (Domhnall Gleeson) is hot on his heels. They fight; Younger Brother is mortally injured and rushed to hospital by Him, Man and Woman. When they return, the parents are dressed in mourning. Lots of other strange people then arrive to attend a wake for Younger Brother (though not the police to look into the circumstances of his bloody death). Mother finally loses patience and kicks them all out. She then berates Him not just for letting strangers overrun the place but for being impotent. This goads him into sexual action. The following morning, a beatifically smiling Mother announces that she’s going to have a baby – she just knows. The news instantly gets rid of Him’s writer’s block: he leaps out of bed and starts scribbling away. (Literally scribbling: a keyboard wouldn’t be poetic enough.)
This is only the half of it – the next invaders arrive several months later, in much greater numbers, just as heavily pregnant Mother is putting the finishing touches to a candlelit dinner for two to celebrate the publication of Him’s masterpiece: the ensuing, cataclysmic mayhem sends her into labour. But it’s enough to give an idea of how Mother! operates throughout. It’s a ragbag of clichés and culturally pretentious allusions. Darren Aronofsky is too smart not to know the clichés are clichés and his knowingness seems meant to elevate his use of them, even though the clichés aren’t otherwise transformed or reactivated. The Biblical echoes are no less obvious – the Cain and Abel routine, Him’s Jesus-style welcome to all-comers: he insists to Mother that Man, Woman et al have nowhere else to go. But this altruism is fused with Him’s not-so-Christlike appetite for enjoying his celebrity: Man is a fan of Him – so are many among the later hordes of gatecrashers.
Although the direction and writing share a lack of discipline, they’re also significantly different. The script is laughable, especially in the portrait of Him. This man has to be A Poet – a novelist would be, in every sense, too prosaic for Darren Aronofsky’s purpose. Given the actual level of poetry sales nowadays, it’s actually very understandable that Him is happy for myriad readers to beat a path to his door, though I doubt that’s the point Aronofsky means to make. You have to admit too that Him understands the tricky thing about literary creation: as he resumes writing, he tells Mother, ‘I know what I want to say – I just need to find the words to say it’. Why he says this is a puzzle, though: according to the film, the mere act of putting pen to paper equates to making successful art. Perhaps a misapprehension that the two things are the same explains how Mother! got written (it’s the first time Aronofsky has had sole screenplay credit). Even though the script is tosh, you nevertheless feel it might be a reasonably entertaining read. As a writer, Aronofsky is a thieving (and tasteless) magpie but at least his bad ideas are reliably half-baked: his attention soon wanders on to something else. What sinks the film is that, as a director, he’s a blunt instrument – relentless and emphatically unvarying. He’s soon at a climactic pitch, tries and fails to up the ante, but keeps pushing. As a result, Mother!, a two-hour bludgeoning, is exceptionally tedious. Someone a couple of rows ahead of me at Curzon Soho switched their phone on well before the end. I had to keep raising my hand to block out the offending screen yet it wasn’t just cowardice that stopped me asking for it to be turned off. Even though I was glad when another audience member eventually did that, part of me couldn’t help thinking this unforgivable behaviour was what Mother! deserved.
There were two aspects I was confident of engaging with – Jennifer Lawrence and her character’s alarm at the invasion of her space. A theatrical release poster (there appears to be more than one version) gives Lawrence a Madonna look – but a kitsch Madonna rather than an art-history masterpiece one. The waxen immobility of the actress’s face on the poster is unfortunately predictive of her fate in the film. Lawrence is eminently well equipped to play an intrepid resister but gets little opportunity to do so here: once Mother has advised Man that the house is a no-smoking area and he virtually ignores her, the star spends most of her time unavailingly telling people what not to do and miming horror at the appalling consequences of their disobedience. Aronofsky’s direction, monopolising and monotonous, flattens out the gradations of horror so that Lawrence’s performance, though game, is repetitive. The sulphurous yellow powder that Mother dissolves in water and gulps down whenever things get too much is no help. There’s a single, exhilarating moment that reminds you of what might have been if the role had been better written – when the pregnant heroine reacts excitedly to feeling the baby move inside her for the first time. She may be one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actresses but Jennifer Lawrence isn’t an icon in the two-dimensional sense of the word. Deprived of material with which to humanise the woman she’s playing, she is seriously diminished.
Although strongly sympathetic to the protagonist’s preference for her own company, I wondered, about halfway through, whether there might eventually be a twist that confirmed Mother – the unsociable, humourless interior decorator – as deserving of comeuppance. Then I wondered if the film might turn into a misogynist fantasy comedy, predicated on the idea that women naturally need to give birth and are paranoid until they’ve actually achieved motherhood. I needn’t have worried on either count: Aronofsky has grander ideas, whatever they may be. It’s evident from reviews that Mother! is open to different readings. The man who made it may enjoy that, as well as the very mixed notices the film is getting. He may be vain enough to confuse his mess of themes and motifs, and what people make of these, with rich complexity; and hostility to Mother! as proof that he’s stirring up troubling feelings in, and thereby challenging, the audience. Encouraged by Aronofsky’s presentation of the title character in Noah as an eco pioneer, several critics have interpreted this new film as an environmental allegory – a story of the damage that reckless humankind is doing to the planet that Mother Nature has made so beautiful, even though this doesn’t quite fit with Mother Lawrence being such a reluctant hostess. I found it easier to see the movie as an hysterical critique of a well-known brand of creative artist – egocentrically single-minded, insatiable for praise at any cost, prepared to tear the heart out of those who love and inspire him. Darren Aronofsky may even see Him as a self-portrait. Perhaps Mother! is a vanity project of a very peculiar kind.
15 September 2017