Mother! Is Bleak and Endless
***WARNING: This review contains spoilers for mother!***
By the time a violent mob of poetry fans kills and eats Jennifer Lawrence’s infant son toward the end of mother!, the film has already assaulted your senses and tested your patience so thoroughly that you’ll just think to yourself: well, sure. I went into Darren Aronofsky's mother! completely blind, and I emerged two hours later nearly deaf. Let me try to explain what I have just seen:
Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem are a married couple who live in a giant house in a clearing in the woods, to which there are no roads. He is a poet and she is fixing up the house, and they have no names, so they are Obvious Allegories for Creation or Whatever. She sits in his study and watches him try to write, they never have sex, the relationship just works. Ed Harris shows up somehow, and barfs, and there is an open sore where one of his ribs would be, and then there’s Michelle Pfeiffer.
Ed and Michelle go snooping all over the house, into places where they are not allowed, and you’re like: I get it, bring on Cain and Abel already, at which time Domhnall Gleeson shows up with his real-life brother Brian, whom he immediately kills. (The fact that “Domhnall" auto-corrects to “downhill” has never been more apt. Please watch his work in Season Three of Catastrophe and Brian's The Bachelor Weekend.) Ed and Michelle are overcome with grief, so obviously the memorial service for the dead son has to take place at The House, which the mourners have sex all over, and eventually destroy.
Oh, also, sometimes the floors of The House bleed, and at various times, Jennifer Lawrence touches the walls and feels The House’s heart beat. For the rest of the time, she just kind of moves slowly through the hallways and the basement and gets startled by things. It’s a bit like Jodie Foster in the prison scenes of The Silence of the Lambs, but much less whimsical.
So the family’s grieving and the mourners’ destruction of The House finally inspires Javier Bardem to start writing, and The Greatest Poem of All Time comes right out of him. Also, he and Jennifer finally have sex, and she gets pregnant and knows it right away. We flash forward nine months to when Jennifer is making Javier a special dinner to celebrate the fact that The Poem has “sold all the copies in the first day,” which is a normal thing that frequently happens.
This is where things start to get weird.
Fans then show up at the door, because they have been moved by The Poem, and they all want a piece of him. And then more come, and then more, and then they start actually tearing up The House for souvenirs. And then they start fighting one another in a very, very long sequence which suggests the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan filtered through the Matrix sequels, and which includes Kristen Wiig murdering people execution-style. Have you ever wanted to see a movie that makes you wonder whether you’ve actually died, and whether what you’re watching is your eternal punishment for a lifetime of sin? Then do as I have done, and go see mother! with a moderately-intense Prosecco hangover.
Anyway, Jennifer has the baby, and she won’t let Javier touch him, because she’s afraid he’ll show him to the thousands of people who have transformed their home into the site of a violent sex rave, which is actually pretty sensible of her. But she eventually falls asleep for a moment, and he swipes the baby and brings him out to the crowd, and the crowd says: “Yum.” Now, Jennifer has been more than patient up to this point, but thousands of strangers eating her newborn son is just a bridge too far. She loses her temper and begins to stab The Poet’s fans, but she is outnumbered and they beat her up for a long time.
Then she sets the house on fire and everyone dies except for her - though she is crispy - and Javier, who is completely unharmed. They say a bunch of abstract lines about love and beginnings and he reaches into her chest cavity and pulls her heart out and squeezes it very hard and turns it into a diamond that he places in a stand and all the home damage is reversed and we are back to the first frames of the movie and the whole process begins again, but with a new woman in Jennifer Lawrence’s role. And then the lights come up and, at least in my case, the audience roars with laughter.
So, yes, it’s a Biblical allegory. But you know what? So is The Apple, and at least with that film you get songs and dances. Mother! is bleak, ponderous, loud, and endless. Major themes are suggested and hinted at, but when it’s time for Jennifer Lawrence to get kicked in the head, shit suddenly gets mad literal. It is a college sophomore who has just returned from Burning Man telling you about a dream he had. It has left me angry at poetry and home renovation, which I will admit is not a particularly difficult thing to do. It is the harshest and most aggressively unpleasant experience I have had in a movie theater, possibly ever, and I sat through The Emoji Movie.
Still, good to see Michelle Pfeiffer back out there. B-minus, I guess.
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