mother!
fucker.
+: the cast, especially Jennifer Lawrence and Michelle Pfeiffer, act the hell out of…
-: …an incoherent, uninteresting film.
This review’s somewhat late, so by now you’re probably aware of two things:
- mother! is meant to be an allegorical film about God. Or maybe Darren Aronofsky himself, although it says bizarre things about the man in that case.
- The film got a F rating from Cinemascore.
The F rating is basically meaningless; Cinemascores basically measure the extent to which a film panders to its target audience; whatever else this film can be accused of, pandering isn’t on the charge sheet.
Said charge sheet, however, is long. I could go through the plot and unpick each individual aspect of the symbolism and semiotics, but that would be paying more attention than the script does. The end result is a shoddy construction, panel gaps visible from space and plastics ready to clatter off the dashboard. The film has its allegories, but it’s either uninterested in keeping them coherent, or else uninterested in properly analysing them, instead engaging in blunt reference.
It is, curiously, all well-acted, which doubtless fuels the positive reviews this film’s received. Jennifer Lawrence gets most of the screentime and a ridiculous amount of closeups (Aronofsky would like you to know, i.e. be constantly aware, that she has pretty, pretty eyes).
The problem is, her storyline amounts to little, in the end, except her a) screaming at people to get out of her house, and b) being thoroughly ignored. Meanwhile, the chaos builds ever higher, adding more to the film without saying more. The end result is like an arthouse take on Michael Bay’s Transformers, endless bangs and explosions and no real depth, and similarly boring, particularly in the second half (something neither the positive nor negative reviews seem to capture). That Aronofsky has little to say is disappointing; that he has no interesting ways to say it is just annoying.
Once you’ve seen the film you understand one way or another, not just why audiences gave it an F, but also what the F stands for.
