In Darren Aronofsky’s deeply allegorical and stunning mother! Jennifer Lawrence is a young woman who has moved into a huge ‘fixer
upper’ house in an unspecified location with her poet husband Javier Bardem –
in the credits she is ‘mother’ and he is, well, ‘HIM.’ She’s done all the fixer-upping
following a fire which has previously devastated the house, while he has been
struggling with writer’s block, hasn’t written a thing for months, and seems
rather distant from her.
Into this rather imbalanced and awkward setup an older guy (Ed Harris) arrives
at the front door, mistakenly thinking it’s a B&B. Bardem quickly befriends
the man and invites him to stay overnight – the first in a series of unwanted
occupations of the house (at least by Lawrence’s character) that drive the
drama of the film - and soon Harris is joined by his drunken wife (a superb, witty performance by Michelle Pfeiffer – so good to have her back on our
screens again) and later their bickering sons.
Tragedy strikes when
one of the offspring is seriously wounded following a fight about Harris's will
(he is dying and has actually come to the house to meet ‘HIM’ being a big fan
of the poet’s work). Harris subsequently becomes
ill and the party, including Bardem, leave ‘mother’ alone to go in search of a
hospital. Lawrence is left to mop up the blood from the fight and discovers a strange, almost
fleshlike bleeding hole in the floor. Soon Bardem returns, not on his own but
with a party of mourners; the wounded son has died. At Lawrence’s insistence the party are asked to leave the
house, which seems to precipitate a defrosting between husband and wife – as a
result ‘mother’ becomes, er, an expectant mother and Bardem's character starts writing
again. But as Lawrence nears full term, the poet’s latest work, clearly the
best thing he’s ever produced, draws a growing crowd of fans to the house to
meet their hero. And then the third house invasion begins.
It’s probably best to watch mother! as a connected series
of extended dream sequences, faithfully recreating the (il)logic and anxiety of the
nightmare. Bunuel’s 1962 movie The Exterminating Angel, with its bourgeois dinner
party guests reverting to their base instincts after being mysteriously trapped
in a house, is clearly an influence. Lawrence’s inability as a pregnant woman to
influence her charming but evasive husband has more than a whiff of Guy and
Rosemary Woodhouse in Polanski’s 1968 movie Rosemary’s Baby; the house as a
living breathing prison conjures visions of the same director’s Repulsion (1965) and the paranoia levels evoke that film and also his The Tenant (1976).
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| Jennifer Lawrence in Darren Aronofsky's mother! |
Although the film can be read as the study of a
marriage in crisis (and also therefore biographically via what we know of Aronofsky's personal life), in terms of what lies behind the movie’s more opaque allegorical tendencies, two
clues give us a possible interpretation. One is an interview in Sight and
Sound magazine, where the director hints about his continuing interest in the
environment, what we’re doing to it and the impact of its neglect (and lest we
forget his previous film Noah was his attempt to take a non-religious view of
the same subject). The other is a poem, punted out as part of the teaser
publicity for the film, called mother’s prayer. This has been adapted by
feminist writer Rebecca Solnit and is an entreaty to mother nature, worshipping
the pattern of the seasons and asking for deliverance ‘from wanton consumption’
of the earth. So it’s possible to view
the birth/rebirth/regeneration themes of the movie as analogous to the cycles of nature, with the house as our valuable
planet, and the unwelcome occupants the wanton consumers. Or something.
mother! is an extraordinary film however you approach it.
It’s certainly a career best for Jennifer Lawrence and arguably Darren Aranofsky
too. It’s a wild ride, bizarrely playful but deadly serious – a real force of
nature.
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