Film Review: Mother! — Squiggles Everywhere
What I wanted from Mother! was to be completely and utterly asphyxiated by tension. That was what I’d gotten from Black Swan, Mother! Director Darren Aronofsky’s brilliantly uncomfortable film about a ballet dancer’s descent into psychosis as a result of her unrelenting pursuit of perfection. I wanted a second helping.
In the build up to the film’s release I had reason to be excited. Firstly, the subject, which I assumed would be motherhood, seemed ripe for another unravelling of a woman’s sanity set in a slowly tightening vice. This was compounded by Mother!’s trailer with screechy strings suggesting someone was absolutely guaranteed to lose their nut.
Initially at least, the film’s plot developed as I was expecting. Mother! picks up with Veronica, played by Jennifer Lawrence, in the latter stages of redecorating the home she shares with her much older poet husband Javier Bardem. Known only as ‘the poet’, Bardem’s character is suffering with writer’s block and an identity crisis resulting from a fire which destroyed his home, the very same home Lawrence has been busy reconstructing (except for the sink which hasn't been braced).
Subtle suggestions that Veronica might be mentally unstable and/or caught in the middle of something supernaturally sinister get a little more tangible when a mysterious couple enters the fray, who it turns out are fans of the poet’s. Intrusive and entitled, their arrival places a strain on Veronica and the poet’s marriage. Whereas Veronica’s sole desire to is to provide a loving environment for her husband and future family, it becomes clear that her husband possesses an insatiable lust for fame and that he will sacrifice anything to sustain the adoration he receives.
This is the point at which Mother! gets utterly bizarre and largely incomprehensible as a seemingly never ending stream of strangers enter the house in ever more absurd circumstances. The home so loving rebuilt by Veronica is raised to the ground by a mob of intruders desperate to claim a piece of the poet for themselves. Amidst the resulting anarchy the narrative explodes like whatever it was that had been holding back Aronofksy’s subconscious just went and snapped.
A film ostensibly about motherhood and which should certainly have been about Veronica becomes all about the poet. Everything exists because of him and for him. Even the couple’s baby turns out to be entirely insignificant, serving only to reinforce the poet’s narcissism and as a device to express the price of fame in human capital.
By the end of the film any attempt to orient yourself is futile. The film’s final sequence is so bizarre, featuring a cameo from Kritsen Wiig for no apparent reason, that it is hard not to give up trying to work out what the point of any of it is and wishing you’d gone to see Kingsman instead.
There is obviously a strong link between Mother! and Roman Polanski’s 1968 Rosemary’s Baby, in which a homebuilding innocent wife is offered up to as a surrogate for the devil’s spawn by her husband in return for a promotion at work. The extent to which celebrity is shoehorned into Mother! suggests Aronofksy was trying to update the horror classic for a 21st century audience.
However, Mother! never comes close to holding its own against Rosemary’s Baby. First off, whereas Mia Farrow was believable as an trophy wife, there to be seen not spoken to about gender pay in Hollywood, the same cannot be said of Lawrence. Veronica is a total doormat of a character, existing only to serve her husband and whose love is so ludicrously strong that she’s even happy for him rip her heart out with his bare hands. It just doesn’t stack up in the current political climate and the thought that Jennifer Lawrence would ever let anyone do that to her makes this one of the Top 10 Comedies of 2017.
Secondly, the poet turns out to be an equally underwhelming character. John Cassavettes’ character in Rosemary’s Baby is in his own right a tool, but at least he did a deal with the devil, which has gravitas. In Mother!, despite a satanic allusion which proves to be cynical misdirection, the poet proves to be little more than an insane narcissist locked in a never ending pursuit of fame. The most interesting thing about him turns out to be his talent for glass blowing.
Finally, as a horror the film is completely undermined by the visual, audio and general action barrage steadily escalates from the film’s midway point. The result is that the paranoia built through the early stages of the film is never channelled. In fact, the ridiculous chaos of Mother! leaves you unsure what to feel at all, except a strong sense of unfulfillment.
Ultimately Mother! is a wholeheartedly disappointing film with a confusing and annoying plot, pathetic characters and extremely obtuse message. The most interesting way of reading the film turned out to be watching Jennifer Lawrence as Jennifer Lawrence, the intrusions into her life as Veronica an allegory for the very public intrusions into her life as Jennifer. Perhaps a celebrity would connect with this film in a more meaningful way, but for us plebs, it just doesn’t work.
Mother! is not Rosemary’s Baby for the 21st century, it is more reminiscent of when an adult starts off their child on a colouring book all neat and coherent, then they give the pen to the kid and its squiggles everywhere.
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