Mother! — A nauseating miscarriage

Mother! (2017) • View trailer 
No stars (Turkey). Rated R, for strong and disturbing violent content, sexuality, nudity and profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.15.17

I never would have believed that the same calendar year could produce another mainstream film as self-indulgently loathsome as February’s A Cure for Wellness.

Actually, this one’s worse.

As her companion (Javier Bardem) inexplicably tolerates the intrusive presence of ever
more strangers in their huge home, our increasingly helpless heroine (Jennifer
Lawrence) wonders — and worries — where it'll all end.

Darren Aronofsky has pushed the borders of good taste — and any semblance of rational narrative structure — ever since 2000’s Requiem for a Dream. When tethered to somebody else’s (reasonably) coherent script — as with The Wrestler and Black Swan — his worst tendencies remain checked. He also can be a gifted actor’s director, having guided stars to Academy Award nominations and victories.

But when Aronofsky directs and writes ... look out.

Case in point: Mother!

Whether allegory, parable or primal scream, this blast of wretched excess is overwrought, insufferably distasteful and — once we reach the dog-nuts third act — vile beyond words. This abomination is guaranteed to enrage patrons into demanding refunds, after which they’ll stumble home, scarred for life, and in desperate need of a shower. And a means to sterilize their brains.

Alas, some things can’t be unseen.

On top of everything else, Aronofsky is guilty of stretching facile symbolism way past sustainability. Mother! might’ve made a decent 25-minute short subject; as a 121-minute assault on viewer sensibilities, it’s an exercise in mind-numbing overkill.

I carefully avoid spoilers, because even bad movies — well, most of them — deserve a chance to impress or surprise. But there’s simply no way to discuss Mother! without revealing Big Secrets. For which I apologize, in advance.

No characters are named. Our heroine (Jennifer Lawrence) shares an imposing mansion — isolated in a field, surrounded by a forest, far from any semblance of civilization — with her husband/lover/keeper (Javier Bardem). The place is a fixer-upper; she paints, plasters walls, handles plumbing and wood-working chores. She has been working thusly for quite some time, essentially re-building what had been a fire-gutted ruin.

He’s a poet, suffering the damnation of writer’s block. She’s patient, sympathetic, nurturing. She prepares his meals, encourages him to try, try again.

We notice that their respective behavior — their very essence — differs as night and day. Bardem is sturdy, powerful and charismatic: grounded despite artistic indecision. He has presence. Lawrence is wispy and ethereal: somehow not quite ... whole. She’s always barefoot, moving through this massive home as if she’s in thrall to it.

Indeed, when she pauses and places an ear to a given wall — fingers gently resting on the surface — she hears (and we see) the structure’s beating heart within.

He works — or tries to — in a beautifully appointed upstairs office: an artist’s paradise that contains a prized, fruit-size gem carefully nestled in a special holder.

Their timeless arrangement is interrupted one evening, by the unexpected arrival of a man (Ed Harris) who apologizes for the intrusion, having assumed that he has found a B&B. Bardem, eager for any novelty that might spark the artistic muse, encourages the visitor to stay. Lawrence is puzzled, even worried. “We don’t know him,” she objects.

Most viewers will have struggled, up to about this point, to assign “normal” human instincts, motivations and behavior to the characters in this increasingly warped tableau. Don’t. That isn’t Aronofsky’s goal here.

The night passes strangely. Lawrence wakes at one point; she follows odd noises and witnesses something weird in the visitor’s bathroom. The next morning, his wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) shows up. She’s pouty, arrogant, defiant and aggressively sensual. She confronts Lawrence at every turn; the latter, bewildered, doesn’t know how to react.

But when the woman expresses curiosity about Bardem’s office, Lawrence is defiant: You’re not to go there, not without Bardem present. A bit later, Bardem and Lawrence are downstairs, when they hear a crash from above. They rush into the office, to find their visitors staring, guiltily, at the shattered remnants of the gem.

Have you got it now?

Will it be more obvious when I mention the subsequent arrival of this new couple’s two adult, quarreling sons? (Brian Gleeson and Domhnall Gleeson handle these roles.)

I wish the a-ha moment were worth the build-up, but that simply isn’t the case. Worse yet, what follows — because we haven’t even reached the midway point yet — bludgeons the metaphor with the subtlety of thermonuclear warfare ... and the resulting radiation poisoning. Aronofsky obviously believes that he’s being clever.

No, he’s merely being repugnant.

Not to mention offensively blasphemous.

I’m not sure which is worse: Aronofsky’s symbolic Man, who is simpering, weak and ineffectual; or his symbolic Woman, who is bitchy, condescending and selfish. But both stereotypes pale against Aronofsky’s apparent view of God, who is vainglorious, benignly cruel and utterly incapable of genuine kindness. Like, wow.

All of which brings us to Lawrence’s role in these insufferably embroidered proceedings. Who, precisely, is she? The most logical guess is that she represents God’s supposed wife, Asherah, a fertility goddess whose presence (some believe) was edited from the Bible by monotheistic scribes. Yada-yada-yada.

Doesn’t really matter, because Aronofsky loses any semblance of control once he moves through a progressively weird second act, into the flamboyantly crude, vulgar, tasteless, obscene and reprehensibly disgusting third act. The profane onslaught goes on, and on, and on, and on ... although, arguably, nothing is as revolting as the bloody, membrane-laden thing that Lawrence sees scuttling down a toilet, early on.

Enough. You’ve been warned. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.