Mother! ** (2017, Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer) – Movie Review

Writer-director Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! starts quite well enough, with an intriguing beginning that promises upmarket mystery and chiller excitement, and then improves a lot when classy performers Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer join the movie and it starts becoming real darned eerie.

But, once their turns are done and dusted, and they leave the movie, it takes a dip and never recovers. The way-too-arty film drags on to over two hours, and it becomes draggy and finally boring. It never settles down to being a horror movie; it is way too self-important and self-conscious for that.

With its chosen theme, it is always treading in the footsteps of Rosemary’s Baby. How could it not? But that means it has to be as good, maybe even better, especially with Darren Aronofsky’s name attached. And it just isn’t. Aronofsky says he was inspired by Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962), another film he hasn’t improved on.

Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem play a couple whose relationship is endangered when uninvited guests start arriving at their home. She is Mother, having a baby, and he is a poet, producing a poem. Both start off blocked, then they produce. Oscar winners Lawrence and Bardem give it all they have – and that is a heck of a lot in terms of intensity and compelling screen presence – but it is not enough. Lawrence doesn’t do a lot of smiling in the movie. She doesn’t look a very happy kind of woman. This kind of unhappiness is infectious. She’s a good enough actress to spread it around.

Quite honestly, the movie lost me. I stopped knowing what it was on about, apart from the general outlines, and  I stopped bothering to care, or bothering to work it out. Sorry, Mr Aronofsky. I’m with Michelle Pfeiffer who said she did not understanding the ‘esoteric’ script the first time she read it.

It is basically a one-set, six actor movie. The set is Bardem’s old family house that Lawrence is painstakingly restoring, while he is struggling with his writer’s block, or actually just enjoying himself. Character-wise, I’m also counting also Domhnall Gleeson as (apparently at least) the Harris and Pfeiffer’s Oldest Son and Brian Gleeson as his Younger Brother, neither of whom have anything significant to do when they also turn up unexpectedly and uninvited.

It is therefore low-budget-seeming project, looking like a Film Festival indie movie, though it is made for major studio Paramount, a mood emphasised by its grungy look shot by director of photography Matthew Libatique using 16 mm film, using weird, unnatural horror movie colour to try to create a scary atmopshere. The Production Design by Philip Messina looks smart enough but it is low key and minimal, the stuff of any average horror movie of this type.

But it cost $30,000,000, which probably has to do with Oscar winners’ and Oscar nominees’ salaries, and it may struggle to make a profit, after being both booed and applauded at the Venice Film Festival. Aronofsky is basically an inspired low-budget indie movie director at heart, with his remarkable beginnings in Pi and Requiem for a Dream. The Wrestler and Black Swan were further masterworks. But this movie is much more like his bewildering 2006 The Fountain. It is however still a step in the right direction after his last film, the 2014 biblical epic Noah.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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