mother! (2017)
Disclaimer: It's going to be a long one. This review will not contain explicit spoilers but will be discussing broader thematic elements that may veer into spoiler territory for movie purists. I'm also going to be discussing the treatment of women in the film, because it was salient to me as a woman watching the movie and I imagine it is something that a lot of people might be impacted by.
And to contrast pretty much every other review of this movie, I'm not going to talk about any of the Rosemary's Baby influence here. There's nothing important enough about it to the movie to get me to talk about Actual Rapist Roman Polanski.
A lot of people will tell you that Darren Aronofsky's latest film, mother!, is psychologically stimulating and exhilarating and will keep you guessing. You can definitely read this surreal thriller in a few different ways, but here's the way I read it: as an interesting but ultimately self aggrandizing and heavy handed clusterfuck of grasps at symbolism. Also, as Aronofsky's love letter to Jennifer Lawrence's breasts. I never thought that I, noted lady who loves ladies, big advocate of Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman in Black Swan, would get so bored of seeing someone's nipples but come on, Darren. We get the point, they're good boobs. Direct the camera elsewhere for a change.
Perhaps I'm not giving Mr Aronofsky enough credit on the mammarial front. Perhaps all of the attention to Lawrence's breasts was to draw focus on the idea of motherhood and breastfeeding. Perhaps this was not the Male Gaze but rather some kind of poorly conceptualized link between a focus on breasts and a focus on the passage of life. That's the kind of logical gymnastics I've been seeing applied to this movie and I'm more than a little frustrated, obviously.
I want to stop talking about breasts, because one of the key issues I had with mother! was the removal of female agency and the confusion in ideological throughline. It's hard to address the abuse of women in modern society while you're also adhering to pretty gross film conventions. Ostensibly, we are following the story of a couple living in a fixer-upper far removed from civilization, the two played by Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem. She plays docile and submissive, preparing his meals and restoring the burnt down house by day. He is a writer searching for inspiration and finding comfort in anything other than her.
There are a few good nuggets of story nestled inside the movie that I held onto, hoping they would make it out of the movie as viable narratives. I ignored the opening shots that indicated a cyclical structure, because I'll take a lack of linear narrative and I'm happy with Aronofsky's usual bleeding between the real and the surreal. I wanted to see how they dealt with what they started to deal with: the treatment and entrapment of women; the manifestations of loss of love. At times the imagery regarding these was so unfathomably heavy handed that they became impossible to deny: Lawrence's character lies on the ground, kicked and beaten by strangers who shout gendered slurs at her; a baby is taken from a new mother a held just out of her reach by a crowd; Lawrence says, outright, "I gave you everything I had". They stick that lampshade right on it. Other times, important times, things are backed away from with lightning speed. At the end of the movie, after all of the plots have exploded, it seems to find its focus and backs away from anything that might have been relevant there. Instead, it becomes about the man once again. It becomes about the creative plight, because that is the story that Aronofsky knows how to tell. If I sound jaded here, it's because I am. I don't want to walk out of a movie feeling this way.
I want to make the feminist reading of the film because I want to see these stories told, but it's hard to do that when the person who is presented as our protagonist is denied agency until the film's final act. Prior to that, she wears a mask of mild irritation while her husband's guests overrun the house and watches blankly as the movie happens to her. It is vaguely upsetting to me that Lawrence does not really get an opportunity to act until the final third of the movie, when things are thematically falling to pieces. By that point, when things are firmly focused on the spectacle rather than on the story, you do actually get to see some good performances beyond the fun that Michelle Pfeiffer and Ed Harris have earlier on in the film. It's the strongest point for empathy with Lawrence's character, as the world of the film is falling upon itself. She wants to break from the house, but she gets pulled deeper. She doesn't want her husband to touch the baby, but he passes it off to a crowd. She works painstakingly on refurbishing the house only to have it torn apart. I like those things. I'm easy to please. If I do take that reading, then the ending forces me to allow men to see the women who love them (always loving them, never being loved) as replaceable (always men and women loving, always men and women) and as mere fuel to a creative fire. That's a shitty story and shitty allegory.That says nothing new and nothing interesting, and you've done that by way of making me feel incredibly uncomfortable through repeated scenes of abuse and sexual harassment and manipulation. And then at the end, it wasn't her story after all. It was his.
I'm not angry at this film because a good movie makes you think and makes you feel things: I'm annoyed, because there's clearly the bones of something good here and they've all been crammed together into something that feels lazy and self-satisfied and so confused about what it is trying to say. It's performative artfulness.
Even from a visual standpoint, there are things about mother! that rubbed me the wrong way. The heavy handedness of metaphor wasn't just in story but in visual - when Lawrence feels the heartbeat of the house, she presses her head to the walls and the transition is a several second fade. It's lazy. We know what she's doing and we know who she is, and it was unnecessary. The shaky camera that worked so effectively in Black Swan felt overutilised here, especially in scenes that involve Lawrence walking from room to room.
Rating: 6/10 - Clearly, I had a lot of issues with this film. I can't argue that it feels like an overall clean and accomplished piece of film with strong performances (bar Lawrence in the first half, where it felt a bit like she was acting under water). While it wasn't to my personal tastes, a lot of people are going to love it, and it's going to sound cool to talk about your contrarian opinion on it depending on the audience. Definitely steel yourselves for violence of the sexual and physical varieties, and that beating scene that had me flinching, and maybe try not to be as irritatingly analytical as I am.
And to contrast pretty much every other review of this movie, I'm not going to talk about any of the Rosemary's Baby influence here. There's nothing important enough about it to the movie to get me to talk about Actual Rapist Roman Polanski.
A lot of people will tell you that Darren Aronofsky's latest film, mother!, is psychologically stimulating and exhilarating and will keep you guessing. You can definitely read this surreal thriller in a few different ways, but here's the way I read it: as an interesting but ultimately self aggrandizing and heavy handed clusterfuck of grasps at symbolism. Also, as Aronofsky's love letter to Jennifer Lawrence's breasts. I never thought that I, noted lady who loves ladies, big advocate of Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman in Black Swan, would get so bored of seeing someone's nipples but come on, Darren. We get the point, they're good boobs. Direct the camera elsewhere for a change.
Perhaps I'm not giving Mr Aronofsky enough credit on the mammarial front. Perhaps all of the attention to Lawrence's breasts was to draw focus on the idea of motherhood and breastfeeding. Perhaps this was not the Male Gaze but rather some kind of poorly conceptualized link between a focus on breasts and a focus on the passage of life. That's the kind of logical gymnastics I've been seeing applied to this movie and I'm more than a little frustrated, obviously.
I want to stop talking about breasts, because one of the key issues I had with mother! was the removal of female agency and the confusion in ideological throughline. It's hard to address the abuse of women in modern society while you're also adhering to pretty gross film conventions. Ostensibly, we are following the story of a couple living in a fixer-upper far removed from civilization, the two played by Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem. She plays docile and submissive, preparing his meals and restoring the burnt down house by day. He is a writer searching for inspiration and finding comfort in anything other than her.
There are a few good nuggets of story nestled inside the movie that I held onto, hoping they would make it out of the movie as viable narratives. I ignored the opening shots that indicated a cyclical structure, because I'll take a lack of linear narrative and I'm happy with Aronofsky's usual bleeding between the real and the surreal. I wanted to see how they dealt with what they started to deal with: the treatment and entrapment of women; the manifestations of loss of love. At times the imagery regarding these was so unfathomably heavy handed that they became impossible to deny: Lawrence's character lies on the ground, kicked and beaten by strangers who shout gendered slurs at her; a baby is taken from a new mother a held just out of her reach by a crowd; Lawrence says, outright, "I gave you everything I had". They stick that lampshade right on it. Other times, important times, things are backed away from with lightning speed. At the end of the movie, after all of the plots have exploded, it seems to find its focus and backs away from anything that might have been relevant there. Instead, it becomes about the man once again. It becomes about the creative plight, because that is the story that Aronofsky knows how to tell. If I sound jaded here, it's because I am. I don't want to walk out of a movie feeling this way.
I want to make the feminist reading of the film because I want to see these stories told, but it's hard to do that when the person who is presented as our protagonist is denied agency until the film's final act. Prior to that, she wears a mask of mild irritation while her husband's guests overrun the house and watches blankly as the movie happens to her. It is vaguely upsetting to me that Lawrence does not really get an opportunity to act until the final third of the movie, when things are thematically falling to pieces. By that point, when things are firmly focused on the spectacle rather than on the story, you do actually get to see some good performances beyond the fun that Michelle Pfeiffer and Ed Harris have earlier on in the film. It's the strongest point for empathy with Lawrence's character, as the world of the film is falling upon itself. She wants to break from the house, but she gets pulled deeper. She doesn't want her husband to touch the baby, but he passes it off to a crowd. She works painstakingly on refurbishing the house only to have it torn apart. I like those things. I'm easy to please. If I do take that reading, then the ending forces me to allow men to see the women who love them (always loving them, never being loved) as replaceable (always men and women loving, always men and women) and as mere fuel to a creative fire. That's a shitty story and shitty allegory.That says nothing new and nothing interesting, and you've done that by way of making me feel incredibly uncomfortable through repeated scenes of abuse and sexual harassment and manipulation. And then at the end, it wasn't her story after all. It was his.
I'm not angry at this film because a good movie makes you think and makes you feel things: I'm annoyed, because there's clearly the bones of something good here and they've all been crammed together into something that feels lazy and self-satisfied and so confused about what it is trying to say. It's performative artfulness.
Even from a visual standpoint, there are things about mother! that rubbed me the wrong way. The heavy handedness of metaphor wasn't just in story but in visual - when Lawrence feels the heartbeat of the house, she presses her head to the walls and the transition is a several second fade. It's lazy. We know what she's doing and we know who she is, and it was unnecessary. The shaky camera that worked so effectively in Black Swan felt overutilised here, especially in scenes that involve Lawrence walking from room to room.
Rating: 6/10 - Clearly, I had a lot of issues with this film. I can't argue that it feels like an overall clean and accomplished piece of film with strong performances (bar Lawrence in the first half, where it felt a bit like she was acting under water). While it wasn't to my personal tastes, a lot of people are going to love it, and it's going to sound cool to talk about your contrarian opinion on it depending on the audience. Definitely steel yourselves for violence of the sexual and physical varieties, and that beating scene that had me flinching, and maybe try not to be as irritatingly analytical as I am.
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