mother! is a pretentious piece of shit. Even the title is pretentious. Oooohhhh the title is lowercase with an exclamation point, look how fucking artsy and special I am. Fuck you. I was duped into watching this thing by a great cast (Javier Bardem, Jennifer Lawrence, Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer) and a marketing campaign that made this look like a horror film. Prior to its release, I heard several theories about what it might actually be about. People thought it might be about ghosts or vampires or a cult. Well, they are all fucking wrong. I think. I don’t really know what this is about, if anything. It values symbolism and allegory over plot and characters, making it something of a cross between David Lynch (who I don’t like) and Terrence Malick (who I fucking despise). Remember the Family Guy skit about the college student film that ends with a clown flipping a pancake? Yeah, this is that sort of thing.
I would normally discuss the plot here, but I don’t have much to work with. Bardem and Lawrence play a couple living in the middle of nowhere. He is an author and has writer’s block. Then a series of stuff happens for a couple of hours. Harris and Pfeiffer show up at their house along with the rest of their family and a family dispute happens. Later, Bardem breaks his writer’s block and the house is immediately besieged by his fans, then a war breaks out in the house. At some point, Lawrence has a child. People in the house accidentally kill the baby and then eat it. If you aren’t following this, then don’t worry because neither am I and I saw the fucking thing. My girlfriend and I had different takes on the meaning of all of this. I thought it was meant as an allegory for the dangers of popularizing and corporatizing art. She thought it was more about gender and womanhood. Maybe we are both right, or both wrong, or one of us is right. I really don’t give a monkey’s nut either way.
The use of symbolism and allegory is well and good, but those artistic tools must be used in conjunction with actual plot and characters in order to provide entertainment value. If not, then the filmmaker is just jerking themselves off (and probably wearing a fedora and vaping while they do it). There are no real characters here. Nobody acts in a remotely rationale way and they are just reduced to vessels to carry symbolic meaning. Similarly, the plot is devoid of any logic or structure except as to convey underlying themes. This is nothing but an intellectual vanity project for writer/director Darren Aronofsky and his girlfriend, Jennifer Lawrence.
This is a very divisive film. You will either hate it (like me) or really like it (as my girlfriend did), but there is likely no middle ground. If you like hyper-artsy things, if you like films by people like Lynch and Malick or books by people like Joyce or Beckett, then you will probably like this. As for me, I enjoy The Money Pit.
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*Please note that The Film Nurse disagrees with the Doctor about this film and was called a pretentious hipster when expressing her opinion.
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Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother!#/media/File:Mother!2017.jpg
