mother! (2017)

I can honestly say that after Black Swan (which I listed on my Personal Canon as a film that influenced the way I approach movies), I was ready to follow Darren Aronofsky anywhere, even through the strange exhibit that was Noah, diverting if peculiar in its biblical revisionism. With mother!, however, a film that sacrifices signification for surreal spectacle, writer/director Aronofsky has transparently lost the plot.

In many ways, mother! most resembles Eraserhead by way of Rosemary’s Baby, a nightmarish portrait of a young woman (Jennifer Lawrence) and her older writer’s-blocked husband (Javier Bardem), whose pastoral life restoring a home is interrupted by the arrival of two strangers (Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer) who bring with them a litany of family strife, consumption, and destruction.

mother! is perhaps the most infuriating film I can recall seeing in a very long time, and I say that as a person who very much appreciates a film that asks its audience to perform leaps of analytical reading. I like a film that makes me think, and there are few passions in my life more ardent than the work of interpretation, of thoughtful analysis, and of cinematic cryptography, but I have never wanted to throw something at a screen more than I did during mother!. There were more than a few moments when I wanted to walk away from the film – something I almost never do because of my abiding devotion to the sacredness of narrative – though it would seem that Aronofsky does not share that same investment in storytelling. mother! is catastrophically ghastly, maddening for its steadfast refusal to give the audience anything to which we can cling when the film verges, as it is wont to do, between poles of frustrating uncertainty and chaotic turmoil.

In a film where the characters are not named, even in the end credits, we have to grasp onto the performers to give the characters some kind of identity. Javier Bardem is captivating, though perhaps the word should be used in the sense of “abducting,” as the film more closely resembles a hostage situation than a moviegoing experience. One hires Bardem for his ability to turn a smile into menace without adjusting a muscle on his face, and on this count he excels as the husband (“Him,” in the credits). He’s scary, and he’s emotionally abusive, but I need more from a film than watching Jennifer Lawrence in perpetual terror for two hours. Her acting in mother! is first-rate, and she’s a perfect audience surrogate as she too faces bewilderment over the myriad of home invasions she suffers. She’s clearly terrified, but at no point did I feel that same fear. I felt angry – furious, even – at the way the film left me at the door without bothering to address the nonsense “logic” governing the whole thing.

Perhaps this is Aronofsky’s whole point, that we are, like Lawrence, thrown into a world that refuses to make sense, that tortures us to the point of despair. I did not, however, have the opportunity to despair because the sensory overload in the film transgresses far beyond human registers into the point of feeling naught but numb. Furthermore, there are things in this movie that are just vile, that would cross the rubicon of the palatable if for one second we had any emotional involvement beyond its appearance as the latest in an inventory of tasteless violence. Aronofsky peppers the film with halfhearted biblical allusions, as if applying Burroughs’s cut-up technique to the book of Genesis. (A riff on Cain & Abel approaches some interesting ground, especially as Aronofsky tips his hand that he’s going for the story of the first murder, but it flies off the rails once the film and its characters appear to have forgotten that it had happened.) If the film is an Old Testament allegory, though, what are Mother Mary and talk of forgiveness doing in the midst of all this? Noah had a similarly loosey-goosey take on textual fidelity, but at least that film had the good sense to throw in rock monsters to keep us engaged. In their place, mother! walks instead through a first-person videogame of destruction, wanton lasciviousness, religious zealotry, and the devastation of a war zone without bothering to clue us into the point of it all.

And if pointlessness is the point, if the object of the game is to obfuscate the message with colliding allegories, isn’t there a way to do that without nauseating your audience to the point of disconnection? I cannot oversell how frustratingly vile this film is, how fiercely irritating it becomes when it, like its houseguests, overstays its welcome and refuses even to gesture at what it’s trying to accomplish. It abuses us and taunts us with our unwillingness to leave. mother! undercooks its plot, overloads its allegory, and assaults the senses until anyone who cared has long since checked out. Aronofsky then slams on the gas in the film’s final minutes, recognizing he’s almost out of time and accelerating past the event horizon of the point I presume he’s trying to make – that people are terrible and God is an abusive, aloof narcissist. mother! leaves its audience with more sound and fury than its narrative could signify, but mostly I’m just left with fury – empathic fury at first, but ultimately just fury at being suckered into a two-hour vanity project that tells us only that Aronofsky is infatuated with Lawrence and with seeing her suffer while wearing translucent blousy nightwear. And if sadism is your thing, mother! is a rip-roaring good time. I, on the other hand, find it grotesque and infuriating.

mother! is rated R for “strong disturbing violent content, some sexuality, nudity, and language.” Written and directed by Darren Aronofsky. Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, and Michelle Pfeiffer.

Noah (2014)

Abandon all hope, ye who anticipate a Biblically accurate adaptation of the flood narrative.  This here’s Aronofsky territory.  The same uber-metaphorical lens through which Black Swan regards Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” gets applied here to Genesis, resulting in a film that is often uncannily strange but never less than engaging.

Russell Crowe stars as the Scriptural patriarch who gathers his family and two-of-every-kind in a colossal ark after a vision from The Creator informs him that the world is about to perish in a flood.  As he gathers his family (wife Jennifer Connelly, sons including Logan Lerman, and daughter-in-law Emma Watson), Noah incurs the wrath of local warlord Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone), who refuses to believe that God has not spoken to him too.  Postscript – check out Anthony Hopkins as a berry-gathering Methuselah, doing that wise old man act he’s perfected by now.

Let’s set aside the religious debate right off the bat.  The film doesn’t purport Biblical accuracy; in fact, director Darren Aronofsky disavows any such intention.  Consequently, I think Noah ought to be measured by the same standards as any other film adaptation of a major mythic narrative, in the vein of superhero or Hercules movies.  And there’s nothing in Noah that constitutes an unequivocal betrayal of the source material, nothing incompatible with the core of the original story.

As an interpretive adaptation, then, Noah is mostly successful, though it borders every so often on the bizarre.  The film is fortunately anchored by a very compelling and very human performance from Crowe, who imbues Noah with a deeper humanity than most interpretations. Rather than present Noah as a stoic “true believer,” Crowe gives him his moments of doubt, his misinterpretations of the message, and his post-flood uncertainty.  (Plus, after this and Man of Steel, Crowe has the market cornered on “dads who put their sons in arks.”)

Aronofsky does some visually clever stuff when he introduces Noah’s visions from The Creator as slideshow dream sequences, working in a nifty sample of the overlap between creationism and evolution.  But then the film gets really weird, and by weird I mean “rock people help build the ark.”  There’s a bit of murky theology in these rock people being fallen angels who help mankind, and their bids for forgiveness play up a side of Old Testament God that isn’t seen too often.  In a movie that otherwise immerses you in a specific time period in antiquity, though, living rocks strain credulity.

The other major subplot Aronofsky introduces is the presence of a tribal chief who goes to war for a spot on the ark.  It’s a plausible addition that Noah’s neighbors might have been a bit jealous, and Winstone is wholly engaging as Noah’s foil.  Aronofsky uses these villains, though, to posit an underlying vegans-versus-carnivores message that ultimately confounds more than it proselytizes.  (Some are reading it as anti-industrialist, though that may be a bridge too far.)  It’s fine for establishing a contrast between Noah and the sinners, but it raises major ethical questions:  Noah kills three hunters to avenge their killing of an animal for food, but he turns a blind eye to the rape and pillage of actual humans next door.  I see what Aronofsky is doing, adding an earthy and spiritual element to Noah’s communion with The Creator, but it’s more distracting than it should be precisely because the logic doesn’t hold up.

All told, though, Noah ends up an engaging film, a successful spectacle – which is, at the end of the day, all I ask of a movie.  It’s far from patently offensive, and the parts in the film that work do work very well.  Aside from a few silly bits, Noah is big-budget pageantry at its most watchable, put forward by a powerful lead performance and directed by a man with an unmistakable (if punctuated by logical error) directorial vision.

Noah is rated PG-13 for “violence, disturbing images and brief suggestive content.”  Aside from the whole exterminating flood, there are a few scenes of bloody combat, other scenes of animals being killed in gory fashion, and a bit of bare-shouldered friskiness from the cast’s younger group.

Next week, something we haven’t done in a very long while – two reviews on the same day. Hint:  what’s the big release this Friday?  And when is the Double-Oh-Seventh of this month?  Put another way, when is an American icon like a British agent?  When they’re both reviewed here, that is!  See you next week!

Monday at the Movies - December 10, 2012

Welcome to Week Forty-Four of “Monday at the Movies.”  This week, we’ll take a look at a few films that grapple with mental illness – perfect timing for those of us enduring the slings and arrows of finals week.

American Psycho (2000) – Either this movie is more fun than it ought to be, or there’s something seriously wrong with me.  Before he was Batman, Christian Bale was Patrick Bateman, yuppie investment banker by day and vicious serial killer by night.  Mary Harron’s infinitesimally gentler adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s downright brutal novel is, simply put, a hoot.  Bateman is insane, no question, and his deeds are despicable, but Bale’s trademark fascinating immersion in the role is riotous to watch, vacillating wildly between pent-up emotionlessness and manic indulgence in his homicidal tendencies.  And as a social satire of 1980s New York, American Psycho is positively brilliant, exposing the excesses and pettiness of such a superficial society without moralizing.  Instead of preaching, the film makes its satire entertaining by encouraging us to laugh at it; the deadpan seriousness with which Bateman examines a business card belies both his internalized rage and the ludicrous attention given to such minutiae.  The standout feature of this film is its ambiguity, which enchants rather than maddens the viewer; a mesmerizing interrogation scene with Willem Dafoe forces the viewer to question who knows what, an uncertainty played to the hilt by Dafoe in three different takes.  By the end, the film pays off on its repetition of the trope of mistaken identity, asking us whether any of these people really “exist” in a tangible form.  What’s not uncertain is how much fun the film manages to be, with an engrossing and star-making performance from its lead, who charms even as he twists the knife.

Black Swan (2010) – Black Swan is in many ways the dark side of American Psycho’s white swan.  Darren Aronofsky’s balance of ballet and mental illness explores in very disturbing and unflinching ways the consequences of the quest for perfection.  Natalie Portman won an Oscar for her role as Nina Sayers, a ballerina whose starring role in Swan Lake is slowly driving her insane; she suspects her understudy Lily (Mila Kunis) of sabotaging her work, though recurrent hallucinations make it difficult for her to discern reality from delusion.  Barbara Hershey has an underappreciated role as Nina’s controlling mother, a former ballerina and perhaps the source of her daughter’s difficulties.  Where American Psycho treated its protagonist’s insanity as exuberantly entertaining, Nina’s descent into madness is distressing and almost uncomfortable to watch; the fast-and-loose representation of reality unsettles the viewer as mirrors misbehave and strangers bear Nina’s face for fleeting frames.  Portman’s Academy Award was well-deserved, as she embodies well Nina’s fears and anxieties by giving the character a full sense of life such that we know her even before we see her dance.  Yet, even though the film is unsettling and uncomfortable, there is something poetically beautiful about it, an aesthetic exquisiteness created by the combination of Aronofsky’s deliberately arranged shots and Clint Mansell’s reworking of Tchaikovsky’s music.  There’s certainly a comparison to be made here with Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, which deals with similar themes, but Black Swan is more metaphorical and more beautiful, one of 2010’s best films, to be sure.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.”  With the release of The Dark Knight Rises on DVD, look for an Armchair Review sometime in the near future!