mother!

This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things
or
"I'll Just get Started on the Apocalypse"

A little prediction: I don't care what loopy project Jennifer Lawrence ever legitimizes with her participation, there won't be anything weirder than the rom-horror film mother!, written and directed by Darren Aronofsky (Pi, The Fountain, The Wrestler, Black Swan, Noah). Where the writer-director has successfully crafted bizarre psychological head-films in the past (and sometimes successfully!), here he's got the slip of a concept—a tract, really—and built a scenario that defies story-logic (or any kind of logic) and heads straight into the the stuff of dreams and nightmares—you know, the things that don't survive the light of day. This one barely survives the light of the projector.

mother! has won a not-coveted "F" rating on Cinemascore (or Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes—what the hell's the difference?) because of its "balls-out" pretentiousness and its complete break from any sort of reality in its thesis on the venality of shallow acquisitiveness. It has all the logic of a dream-nightmare. As such, it's an empty vessel (at a hysterical pitch) into which viewers can pour any cockamamie theory based on their personal obsessions (not unlike the Internet).

You realize very early on that the thing is a metaphor—maybe even a "meta-five"—as things progress and escalate beyond the reasonable limits that any self-respecting person might allow. And that's sort of its point; no self-respecting person would. But, if they did, there wouldn't be a movie (maybe it's a "meta-three").

There is a quick preamble of an unsettling image before the scripted title of "mother!" fades on the screen, with a twee sound effect to mark the exclamation mark (this thing is sound-designed to a six-tracked fare-thee-well).
We see "Him" (Javier Bardem)—"He" has no name which is the first sign of pretentiousness—as he places a glass crystal on a pedestal carefully and looks on it with a devoted smile. The dark space that it's in gradually fills with light, charred frames become unblemished and a morning bed becomes filled. 

"Baby?" Jennifer Lawrence's "Her" wakes up alone, and feels over at the empty half of the bed. No answer. She gets up and wanders around in her nightie around and around the round-house of a multi-leveled rustic house that has all the appearance of having fallen from space in the remote, almost painted landscape. This wandering around is done at an almost "stalker" closeness, over her shoulder from her perspective—we don't see anything until she sees it, locking us into her view. And her hearing—we hear ever creak of the wood flooring, every rustle of a drape, every rasp of her breath, no matter how subtle. We become so "full" of tangible awareness that it starts to feel "horror-show" creepy and we start to dread what will come next. The movie's just getting started.

"She" finds "Him"—he was hovering right behind her, and at this point Aronofsky goes into "Super-Close-Up" mode as Bardem's "Him" tells "Her" how much he loves her. The shot of Bardem is a close-up over Lawrence's shoulder, but the reverse shot on "Her" is such a "personal-space-invader" that you feel like you can see her pores. The POV is so vertiginous that you feel like you could fall into the screen at any moment, so uncomfortable is the feeling. But, you don't want to be a part of this nightmare. Leave that for other people.

After a day of "Her" fixing the house up and "Him" not writing in his study (it's just not coming is his explanation) they have a visitor that evening. A doctor (Ed Harris)—an orthopedic surgeon arrives, thinking that the place might be a bed and breakfast. Bardem's "Him" invites him in, which, one guesses, is alright with "Her" despite some hesitancy. The doc and "Him" get along great, and pretty soon, he's staying the night, smoking cigarettes in the house and getting really, really drunk, keeping "Him" out of their bed for the night. Well, that's kind of inconvenient, the doctor violating the serene, safe, secure little two-some they had going.

But, it gets worse (sure, it does). The next morning, the doctor's wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) shows up, wanting to know what's going on and "Him" just invites her in to stay for a few days. By this time, "Her" is all-wtf??? and the level of discomfiture starts to reach a pitch beyond slightly vexed to genuinely annoyed (but not quite to the level of the circling "Why is this happening?" shot), especially once the doctor's wife starts to get a little...invasive. Oh, she's polite, but she can't help herself commenting on the age-difference between "Him" and "Her" and their lack of children. A crowded house is one thing, but a crowded psyche is another and the wife is definitely trying to rent space in "Her's" head.

About this time, I started playing the "Compare" game in my own head just to try and figure out where it was all going. Foolish exercise. But, I was starting to get the creeping paranoia feeling of a John Sturges film called Kind Lady, in which Ethel Barrymore's rich, sheltered widow has her house invaded by an artist (Maurice Evans) she has befriended, who starts to take over her life and then her house, with the help of a disreputable couple (Keenan Wynn and Angela Lansbury). But Aronofsky soon moves past that scenario right into the nightmarishly surreal. 

That's about the time "the kids" show up, one of whom is smug and the other is distressed (they're played by Brendan Gleeson's sons) and that escalates into a knock-down-drag-out fight that has a sociopathic disconnect from any sense of "knowing your place" or "being a good guest" and ends up with spilled blood, a trip to the hospital, and a stain that "Her" just can't get out of the carpet and which starts to seep (once she can't just leave it alone) with an ever-increasing leakage of blood down her basement walls that defies the amount any normal hematopoietic reproduction could produce. With that little horror biology revelation present, the movie starts to go down the bloody slippery slope to its increasingly bizarre conclusion and its Big Point.

So...mother! may produce two after-image reactions: you may want to sit in some coffee shop discussing "what it all means" or you may simply go "pfft" derisively rather than have it spoil a perfectly good cup of coffee. There is conjecture (oh, there is conjecture) to The Big Meaning—Lawrence thinks it's an environmental message movie with the house being Mother Earth (or maybe she is, I forget) that becomes increasingly violated until it all comes burning down, only to be recreated later. I think she's probably fooling herself. As what I think it is, it's a bit more personal than cosmic and has more to do with the arc of a relationship than an eon.

I'd put a spoiler alert here if I thought my fershugginer theory was any better than anybody else's. I see mother! as an hysterical "mea culpa" statement of the way men—it focuses on "creative" men, but it's "men," in general—are constantly in predatory mode when it comes to women and in recycling mode when it comes to relationships. "The things we do to women" is what Martin Sheen's President Bartlett would occasionally muse to his mostly male staffers on "The West Wing." We can call it all the cute names we want (like "The Seven Year Itch"), but men, unless they've grown up sufficiently and matured enough, have a tendency to discard long-term relationships once things "get complicated," or their frailties are exposed, or they no longer feel "in control" of the relationship or their lives. Rather than admit that maybe they never had it, they seek out the new and start from scratch...until such a time as they lose it there, too, the shlemiels. Rinse and Repeat. Male vanities and male proclivities are volatile unless properly aged.

"Don't sit THERE! It's not BRACED yet!" is the line that is the
marker for increased hysteria and decreased tolerance for the situation.

Well, somebody had to say it, and these days such a pronouncement is certainly not going to be by presidential decree. That it comes off as self-serving and a bit hypocritical ("Hey, Darren, who're ya 'seein'' these days?") and that it has a great deal of torture porn to it makes it more creepy and unintentionally anti-feminist than the author might have intended if he wanted it to be a truly self-flagellating movie. Anyway, the movie shows the dark side to aspiring and how even the greatest of instincts can turn despairingly cruel.

Some-body had to say it.