Movie stars like Jennifer Lawrence don’t usually make films like Mother! and by that fact alone, this film is unique and interesting in a way. The movie came out on September 15th and in less than a week the film has been chewed up in so many different, inexplicable ways. A.O. Scott of The New York Times called it a “divine comedy” and “a hoot!” while Rex Reed said that it could possibly be the worst movie of the century (how one could declare this when the century is only seventeen years old is both beyond me and an example of Reed’s self-serving pomposity). An uncomfortable truth is that this movie does work, at least in the sense that director Darren Aronofsky wants it to, and the violent reactions to it seem to prove that. The movie is both a sophisticatedly made psychological thriller and an almost amateur-ish attempt at Lynch-ian allegory. I find Lynch’s games fun about half of the time, and Aronofsky doesn’t have his sense of humor or grace, but his commitment to the absurdity of this tale can be almost as admirable.

The Jennifer Lawrence bubble may have burst last fall with Passengers but she’s still one of the most viable stars in Hollywood. Her choosing to do Mother! hopefully proves that her Passengers days are behind her. Her personal relationship with Aronofsky probably did a lot toward getting her to take this part, but she does not play the role passively. She plays an unnamed wife living in an isolated home with her unnamed husband (Javier Bardem), who is a formerly successful poet facing writer’s block. She spends her days fixing up the house which has only recently recovered from a fire. Bursting with love and affection for her husband’s place of creation, she has been remodeling the home room by room, piece by piece, and it is close to its former (theoretical) glory. That is, until they are visited by a doctor (Ed Harris) and later by his wife (Michelle Pfeiffer), and several other members of the family. All come to see her husband, the literary celebrity, all curious about his new work. They make themselves at home without pause, showing little respect to the time and patience that the wife has spent on this house.

There’s more. Lots more. People continue to come. Scores of them. **Spoiler alert** Some of them mean more harm than others, some of them kill or get killed, and one of them is played by Kristen Wiig. After the halfway point of Mother! Aronofsky flagrantly discards narrative harmony in place for emotional and physical chaos. Lawrence is always at the center of it. Aronofsky shoots her almost exclusively in tight close-ups. Scenes are blocked and cameras are placed according to her position. Aronofsky is obsessed with her, and who wouldn’t be? It’s hard to see the line where cinematic integrity ends and sexual infatuation begins. The director’s style here works because Lawrence is so beautiful and also because Lawrence is remarkably committed to the role. Even I have grown fatigued by Lawrence’s overexposure in the last five years, but she has always been a mechanically exceptional actress. It’s hard to imagine another 27-year-old actress as famous as her who would take it to this extreme.

Bardem has spent a career specializing in roles like these, as has Harris. When Pfeiffer is on the screen Mother! has a whiff of camp to it that really brightens an otherwise uneventful first hour. Pfeiffer and Lawrence are both playing protective wives. One is older, more experienced, willing to express sexual needs while the other is skeptical, uptight, too concerned with the nature of her surroundings – of her home – to really give her all to this competition. And Pfeiffer’s character does make it a competition. Their behavior is strange, redundant, and for the most part, left unexplained, which goes a long way toward creating the current internet obsession with Mother!‘s meaning. There are plenty of people giving their explanations. I’ve read a select few and none of the theories ring false, but this is playing into Aronofsky’s hands, once again proving he’s much more provocateur than auteur. He’s not simply un-subtle, he’s obnoxious, and he leaves the feelings of his films to the actors to create.

Mother! actively courts comparisons to Polanski’s 1960’s films Rosemary’s Baby and Repulsion, amongst others. Polanski was always fascinated by the women horrifically victimized by the world, and he was a master of visualizing those nightmares. Polanski was no doubt influenced by his many personal tragedies, and his obsessions took him over the edge when he became one of the monstrous predators he so skillfully villainized. The difference here is that Aronofsky has never truly cared about women throughout his films. They’re drug addicts, cancer-ridden wives, strippers, brutalized ballerinas, but they never really came to life as characters. That worked in Black Swan because Natalie Portman was so brilliant and because that film was about, in a way, the fragile identity of its protagonist. Black Swan is the only other Aronofsky film that comes near Mother!‘s state of surreality, but in Mother! we’re mostly left feeling bad for Lawrence who’s delivering great work in a film that seems mostly interested in her suffering.

There’s value to a movie like Mother! I, for one, was entertained. Its silly attempts at metaphor feel endearing in their sincerity. More than anything, I was excited for the conversations that would be sparked. Walking out of the theater, I heard a woman say to one sitting near her (they had not come together) that this was one of the worst films she’d ever seen and she wanted her money back. The other patron said she loved it, and began defining metaphor in a very patronizing way. I began to realize that I was going to be annoyed by both sides of this argument, while still being fascinated that a movie as obviously untidy as Mother! would be called absolutely bad, absolutely good, absolutely anything. I find Aronofsky to be a very talented filmmaker with a very troubling, sometimes dangerously irresponsible approach to narrative storytelling. He conflates extremity with absurdity too often, which means he might not really know the difference. That’s Mother!‘s worst sin, I think. Be extreme or be absurd, what’s in between is obviously making Rex Reed very upset.

 

Written and Directed by Darren Aronofsky