VENICE FILM FESTIVAL

Venice Review: Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! Is a Spectacular Attack of a Movie

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition as overseen by Hieronymus Bosch.

by
GUY LODGE

SEPTEMBER 5, 2017 12:21 PM

There are angrily haunted walls, live organs in the toilet bowl, and floor cracks that turn into squidgy open wounds in Mother!, with a blazing inferno consuming the screen in the very first shot. But those might just be bloody, shuddery distractions: with apologies to Sartre, in Darren Aronofsky’s exhilarating, shape-shifting horror-not-horror movie, the real hell is other people. As lusty boos bounced off the walls of the Venice press screening theater while the credits rolled, I briefly felt much the same way. I wanted calm to absorb the pained, deranged provocation I’d just seen, not others’ loud, livid snap judgments; there’d been more than enough sound and fury in the preceding two hours.

I get the discord: Mother! is not a well-behaved movie. It does not obey the loosest expectations, even for an art-genre whatchamacallit by which we eagerly anticipate being freaked out. In terms of cinematic structure and discipline, it makes Black Swan look like an episode of Murder, She Wrote. Aronofsky compresses and splinters time with as much abandon as he stretches logic; the film’s story world turns as infinitely vast or as claustrophobically tiny as he needs it to be from one scene to the next. Aronofsky has cast his audience adrift like this before: 11 years ago, in the likewise contentiously Venice-premiered The Fountain, in which polite narrative and metaphysical rule sheets also gave way to persuasive, expressive surges of feeling.

Where The Fountain bent time, space, and our brains in the name of uncontainable love, however, Mother! is made in a very different spirit—one that’s tricky to articulate without unravelling too much of its in-the-moment pleasure. It’s an unruly film, though not at all an obscure one: its themes and feelings are laid quite bare, its heart ripped out of its chest and served, still pumping, on a dinner plate. There’s lashing hostility in its excesses, the fevered insecurity of an artist who fears the attention of his public as much as he does their abandonment, and an acrid streak of romantic regret that might, if you squint just right, make this The Fountain’s most unlikely bookend. That film was his valentine to then-partner Rachel Weisz. This one? I wouldn’t dare speculate, but my lurid side would give a barrowful of pennies for Weisz’s thoughts.

“I’m just trying to bring life into this house!” an unnamed poet (Javier Bardem) bellows at his unnamed wife (Jennifer Lawrence) in one of their growingly loaded squabbles—a passive-aggressive admonishment that can be read so many ways you want a minute to let it sink in, though Mother! doesn’t like to wait too long between hurtful strikes. He’s hardly being truthful, depending on your definition of life: a celebrated writer who’s been brooding and distant while he stares down a creative block, he’s been sexually negligent to his wife, too, with the question of procreation a fraught silence between them. The house, meanwhile, is a gorgeous, creaking Gothic wedding cake of oak and plaster, which she’s singlehandedly renovating to oppressive levels of perfection in tellingly bilious shades of putty and parchment.

By “life,” he means mess, and specifically the mess of other people. He’s delighted when an emphysemic stranger (Ed Harris), followed in short order by his lyxnish wife (deliciously played by Michelle Pfeiffer with no retractable claws), turns up on the doorstep, unannounced and unexplained, and practically invites himself to stay. The woman of the house is less thrilled: for a time, it seems that Mother! might just be a wittily extreme meditation on the horrors of houseguests. Once the invaders profess themselves die-hard fans of the Poet’s work, the stakes shift queasily inwards, and her struggle is no longer one simply for restored domestic peace: it’s a tooth-and-nail fight for her husband’s attention, as he’s ever less retrievably consumed by the adoration of others. And yet the people keep coming—how? why? and from where?—in contemptuous defiance of her patient pleas and protests, in thrall only to the man and his words. The fuller the house gets, the more it literally drips blood.

Fashioning itself as a haunted-house movie is the most brilliant of (Mother!’s many bluffs and rug-pulls. The house itself, a perfectly whorled, shiver-infested creation by production designer Philip Messina, may heave and rumble like a stomachache, but it’s not the primary problem, even as its eerie false walls reveal themselves and floorboards turn inexplicably to kindling. For this is the nightmare of a haunted marriage, with the threatened male ego as its rampaging ghost: “I am I,” utters Bardem without a glimmer of irony, as Lawrence—who’s never been quite so nakedly disempowered on screen—transitions from uncomprehending panic to all-too-comprehending terror.

Yet even that realization, on her part and ours, is scant preparation for the film’s last act, and its high dive into elastic bedlam, with dream house unfolding into limitless dreamscape: call it Extreme Makeover: Home Edition as overseen by Hieronymus Bosch. If that sounds glib, it’d be remiss of me to get any more specific than that. It’s been a long time since a big-studio movie leapt this recklessly into the void, but nothing in Mother! feels wanton or for-the-big-burning-hell-of-it. Aronofsky’s subtext is as sharply pointed as his formal means are outlandish, with every collaborative contribution, from Lawrence’s catgut-taut performance to Matthew Libatique’s anxiously dimmed, snaking camerawork, on the same charred page.

Is there a message in its metaphor, a compacted diamond of truth emerging from the ash? It’s not for any critic to dictate. But the longer I sit with Mother!, the more moved I am by its madness—after the initial, head-lolling rush of watching it transpire. You can go to town listing the references to other artists’ work here, from the poster-teased Rosemary’s Baby to Repulsion to Antichrist to, hell, the Southern Gothic gunge of that underrated Kate Hudson potboiler The Skeleton Key. But they all seemingly add up to one idiosyncratic artist’s unforgiving self-examination—with an undertow of humility, even apology, to the big, swaggering gut-slinging up on screen. There’s a small, or perhaps not so small, part of this beautiful, spectacular attack of a movie that wants to be booed, but that doesn’t mean we should be swift to do so.

 VANITY FAIR