mother! (2017)

I don't like feeling deceived when I go to the theater. Considering how difficult it is to shell out almost $15 to see a film these days, one must choose carefully which movies she sees in the theater. For me, that has meant choosing films and (more importantly) filmmakers who are known for creating strong, original work. A fan of Black Swan and The Wrestler, I had considered Darren Aronofsky one of those people. I must rescind that assumption after seeing his most divisive movie yet, mother!. 

First, I want to shut down several myths surrounding this film. For one, this movie is not at all the violent, disturbing, pornograhic gorefest its reputation suggests. There is one scene, which I will discuss later, that is certainly disgusting and will outrage people, but that really is it. Frankly, the movie bored me to tears, but I'm getting ahead of myself. 

Second, this film is not at all original. Not even close. A pastiche of so many older, superior films, mother! is as derivative as it is dull. I truly hope Roman Polanski is collecting royalties from this film because it is such an egregiously blatant rip-off of Rosemary's Baby. The "plot," which feels too generous a word, has plenty of similarities (the deceptive husband who sells out his wife/baby, the meek woman, the pregnancy, the growing invasion of their home, etc.), but it is the attempt to out-do Polanski's metaphors and depth that irritated me the most. 

Third, mother! is not a horror movie. The trailer had the most tantalizing imagery I have seen in years, and I was hooked. The marketing team for mother! deserve a hefty paycheck because they sure convinced me to see this movie, but all on the basis of better editing in the trailer than in the actual movie. Everything from the trailer's atmosphere to the plot summary on countless websites, to say nothing of the divisive reputation, made mother! seem like The Devils (1971) of my generation. Yet, this was nothing more than creative re-imagining. 

So, what is mother! really about? Well, there is no story. mother! (with a lowercase "m" to punctuate the genius) is an extended metaphor for Christianity, God, and creation. No characters have names. In fact, there are no characters; there are only symbols. 

The film opens with Jennifer Lawrence on fire, her flesh searing and melting before our eyes. We then see Javier Bardem place a weirdly-shaped clear rock on display amid what is clearly the charred remains of a house. When he sets the rock in display, the house slowly returns to its pre-fire zenith, ending with a lump of ash in the burned bed transforming into Lawrence. I was already feeling echoes of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca in which we are invited to see Manderly's charred remains as the nameless narrator--a young woman married to an older, aloof man--begins the story of their marriage and the destruction of their home. So, the derivative aspects of mother! begin with the first images. Not the best way to begin a supposedly original film. 

I'm going to go out and spoil the characters and plot by giving my impression. Bardem is God (his name in the credits is "Him" with a capital "H"), Lawrence is Mary. Always wearing white and clearly virginal, Lawrence represents the Holy Virgin; she directly tells her husband, "You don't fuck me." His response is to start having sex with her. We don't really see any sex, though, and when she awakens she knows she is pregnant. 

Michelle Pfeiffer (billed as "woman") and Ed Harris ("man") arrive at Bardem and Lawrence's house early in the film. As far as setting things in motion goes, they are basically supposed to be Adam and Eve. Their two sons show up, and one kills the other (oooh! Cain and Abel!), and the rest of the film becomes a pretentious "Find the metaphor!" pu-pu platter of Biblical symbolism. I won't go into each detail, mostly because that will become exhausting, but will suffice it to say that this film is not a film in the classic sense of the word. mother! is bloated extended metaphor that is expressed visually. There are no characters, there is no story, there is, in fact, not one note of music; mother! is only a string of symbols that grow increasingly bananas to represent...(wait for it!) civilization going baaaaaaaddddddd! And what happens when civilization gets baaaaaaaaaddddddd beyond redemption? Why, God sends his only begotten son to deliver us from evil. 

This brings me to the most divisive, cynical, and disgusting part of the movie. After Lawrence gives birth to their son, Bardem eventually gets the baby from her and presents it to the wild crowd outside their room. The crowd takes the baby and passes him over each other (kind of like passing around a person at a metal concert, which I don't think was an accidental metaphor). Lawrence runs to the front of the room screaming, and then we see the baby roasted and served on a table. Everyone has taken handfuls of the baby, and they are eating him ritualistically. 

The scene was disgusting for many reasons, especially the slurppy sound everyone made while they were eating the baby, but the literal depiction of Holy Eucharist was rather offensive. I completely understand people who hate this movie for that scene. For me personally, Aronofsky crossed a line this time in the most profane and narcissistic way. And here is where calling Rosemary's Baby superior feels like the understatement of the millennium. Rosemary's Baby may be full of witches and Satanic imagery, but there was a moral to the film; rather than belittling religion, Polanski is examining far more profound and interesting themes about gender and morality. mother!, on the other hand, is a masturbatory allegory that really has nothing to say.

And that is where my distaste comes in. I won't say the film offended me so much as it left me irritated and bored. The camera is only in three places: in front of Jennifer Lawrence's face, behind her head, or showing her point of view. It's a good-on-paper idea in that it sounds far more interesting than it is in practice. The action is difficult to see, and the film felt so dull because of it. At least one-third of the movie is just following Lawrence around. When you combine that with no music and very little sound, the film is at-best laborious to watch. It's boring and indulgent, and does not really reveal anything interesting or profound. 

As for the religious symbolism, I felt it said nothing. Beyond being a guessing game about what represents what, there really is nothing to mother!. There is certainly no story and there are no characters, so as a result there is no pathos. None at all. During the baby eating scene, I felt sick to my stomach, but not because I was worried for the baby or identified with Lawrence's character's feelings. I was simply grossed out. Considering this movie came from the man who gave us The Wrestler, one of the most moving films of the 2000s, I am appalled at the lazy self-indulgences taken in mother!. The symbolism is clever, I suppose, but it doesn't say anything. Unless the point of the movie is that God is a megalomaniac, I'm not sure what the point of this giant mess was. 

I will highlight one good thing about this movie, though: Michelle Pfeiffer. Hers was the performance that stood out the most to me. She was entertaining to watch, you really had no idea what she would say or do, and she was actually funny. I went into this film excited to see Michelle be evil, but she's only in a few scenes. I can't think of anything that represents how much Hollywood hurts itself with its own ageism than how underused Michelle Pfeiffer was in this movie. 

I do feel so torn about this movie, though, because, despite the trashiness of it, I was impressed Paramount green-lighted a movie this divisive. In a market flooded with comic book movies, "based on a true story" didactic nonsense, remakes, and franchises, it is refreshing to see something not playing into any of that commercialism. But did it have to be this lousy?

Grade: D

American Beauty (1999)

I watched Sam Mendes's Oscar-winning film American Beauty for the first time, and rather than feeling the wait was worth it, I wish I had waited indefinitely. Of this self-indulgent morass of phony insight and at-best pedantic attempts at castigating the suburbs, there is little to admire. 

There is not really a plot, which is not a criticism. Countless exceptional films have no plots but shine because of their outstanding characters and story. American Beauty is not one of those films. 

The film revolves around bored man-child Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) and his wife, phony real estate dealer Carolyn (Annette Bening). These two selfish, upper-middle class people have a large house in a nice neighborhood complete with white picket fences and a grumpy teenage daughter, Janie (Thora Birch). Their neighbors consist of a gay couple and a new family whose peeping-tom son and Nazi, homophobic-but-secretly-gay father fuel much of the tension. Lester becomes infatuated with Janie's friend Angela, who wants to be a model and exaggerates her sexual prowess. Angela and Lester have this strange flirtation going on for most of the movie, which comes to represent Lester's frustration with his life and his determination to quit living a fake life. 

What does his rebellion entail? Why, buying pot from the neighbor's son, having sex fantasies about his daughter's friend, and working out to look hot for the girl. He quits his job in a scene that was, I believe, intended to be dark but was actually comical. Kevin Spacey is a brilliant actor, but not even his immaculate talent could save this mess of a movie. Lester is completely unsympathetic, unlikable, and uninteresting. There is pretty much no reason to feel invested in his character. None. He comes pretty close to having sex with his daughter's friend, intentionally starts working at a fast food restaurant, complains nonstop, has no relationship with his daughter, and becomes a pothead. Granted, this kind of depravity has the potential to be interesting, but in the hands of Sam Mendes and Alan Ball, this degeneration feels phony. I found nothing realistic about Lester. There was nothing sympathetic about his decline, either. His decision to start acting like a dumbass does not at all feel like a rejection of false and greedy values; it feels like an emotional regression caused purely by that character's own idiocy, not the suburbs. 

Yet, his decline is portrayed as some sort of tragic product of the lowly, decrepit suburbs. In fact, the whole point of this movie is that the suburbs are evil and will destroy everything human about you and eventually kill you. The writer (Alan Ball) tried way, way, way too hard to make his dialogue "edgy" and his characters' problems "real," but what you really end up watching is a goofy film that is completely oblivious to its own goofiness. In trying to be so serious, Mendes and Ball instead created a film that feels like a parody of the anti-suburb film. 

The one thing to admire is the acting, and with such a stellar cast there is little question why. Despite being given little to work with, Annette Bening gives a strong performance as Carolyn; in fact, hers was the one character I wanted to know more about. She's selfish and phony - to say nothing of the fact that she's having an affair - but there seemed to be a lot of pain there. Annette Bening is a goddess among actresses, and I think the only reason why Carolyn seems to have any kind of internal life is because of Bening's acting ability. In the hands of a lesser actress, this character would have been even more unlikable because there is so little to work with. 

Chris Cooper has a prominent supporting role, but his character's motives and actions are so blatantly obvious and predictable from the moment he appears on screen that it feels too generous to call the conclusion anti-climactic. His character seemed to serve no other purpose than to allow Mendes and Ball to pat themselves on the backs for their (allegedly) powerful and provocative gender politics. However, much like Carolyn, Cooper's character - whose name we don't even learn - has no internal life and feels more like a caricature. He's just...there...to fulfill yet another check on this goofy list of imperatively included items in an already bloated film. 

The one character I had anything resembling sympathy for was the daughter, Janie, played by Thora Birch. She actually felt like a person (for the most part), and I did feel sorry for the kid. Her parents were the most shallow people alive. Her best friend was a mean girl and only used her to feel better about herself, as the neighbor-boyfriend (Wes Bently) points out. She was also the only character who seemed to have any emotional depth; her motivations were understandable, as were her reactions. 

American Beauty tries to be The Ice Storm (1997), Blue Velvet (1986), and Sunset Boulevard (1950) all at once, but this film doesn't even deserve to be in the same video store as these far, far superior films. It's a stupid movie, plain and simple, and perhaps the most trite, self-indulgent nonsense I have seen in a long time. It's going to take a while for me to get this awful taste out of my mouth. 

Grade: D