Mother! (2017) — Read Along
Horribly grim. Highly recommended!
Fancy joining a man dressed in a Radiohead t-shirt and the naked wife of Salvador Dali for 8 minutes and 11 seconds as he extols the virtues of this magnificent film whilst talking around it without spoiling it and telling you everything and nothing about this Darren Aronofsky master work?
You do?
Well that’s marvellous!
Help yourself to the chocolate biscuits, pull up a chair, kick off your shoes and join your humble narrator who remains rather pleased with himself with the following sentence he originally penned on 4th March 2023:
“The house is alive but the occupants are deathly wraith like figures, Mephistopheles reaching up to grab them from the fire pits of hell as their Mother Goddess, exploited, abused and mistreated, is dragged into hell with them”.
So with an appetite hopefully whetted for more I now present to you my original spoiler free review (as well as every other film in the cinematic canon of Darren Aronofsky as I’m rather obsessed with the American filmmaker) as well as further links to 7 volumes of my “Essential Film Reviews Collection” on Amazon but more importantly both my Youtube and Rumble channel readings of my own review, hence the “Read Along” premise. So I do all the heavy lifting here and you simply relax and enjoy the chocolate biscuits as I read my review direct to camera and you read along with me. You can opt out of the Youtube/Rumble video watching if you wish (but if you do join in please do consider subscribing to either or both channels!) or you can simply read the spoiler free review upcoming.
Of course you’re free to do neither and merrily skip along to your next port of call within our digital electrical Matrix and I wish you well on your onward journey.
Hope you enjoyed the biscuits!
See you on the other side.
"The Essential Film Reviews Collection" Vol.7
"Mother!" (2017) - original article
"Darren Aronofsky and 6 films for your consideration" - original article
"The Whale" (2022) - original article
I first watched Darren Aronofsky’s biblical descent from the narcissism of celebrity fame into the very pits of hell via a Hammer House of bloody horrors during the first week of its initial UK release in September of 2017, and via the medium of a date with the fairer sex. Even back in those halcyon days of an ever faraway 2017, I sure could give a young lady a whirl of a time! I could embellish this tale further but I have no need as my memory, for a recent change, remembers clearly and distinctly the young lady in question exhaling heavily as we left the reassuring darkness of our local cinema, and away from the blood drenched walls of an Aronofsky creation of immense heightened intensity that relentlessly follows you around a living and breathing house of horrors, a house her mother desires to be an Eden like “paradise” but which has descended into the pits of an unimaginable, inescapable and grotesque hell, by looking me square in the eye and saying
“Well that was bloody weird!”
Bloody weird it was. Bloody weird it still is. And brutally bloody brilliant it is too!
When I was showing that young lady the time of her life by subjecting her to this macabre and surreal dizzying descent into the destruction and re-birth of a virginal Madonna, a Mother Earth Goddess if you will, I didn’t enjoy the story being told (largely because I hated every character bar one and still find the story a little befuddling) but I LOVED the oppressive intensity, the no room to breathe or take stock of what is really happening. For this, Aronofsky takes immense credit. The house of soon to be bloody horror is open plan, under renovation, the mother, building a nest and a “home” for generations to come. Aronofsky follows his Mother Goddess, forever dressed all in white or light, dowdy grey, constantly in extreme close up or just over her shoulder, as doors are opened and doors are closed, conversations tail off between rooms as the inhabitants of this beautiful house walk amongst it, through it, live it, breathe it, consume it whole. The house is alive but the occupants are deathly wraith like figures, Mephistopheles reaching up to grab them from the fire pits of hell as their Mother Goddess, exploited, abused and mis-treated, is dragged into hell with them.
Here are your detestably unlikeable, bar one, principal players:
“Mother” (Jennifer Lawrence) Framed constantly in a stifling extreme close up, I’d argue this was the zenith of Jennifer Lawrence’s stratospheric rise to the cream of motion pictures with a quite astounding performance of bewilderment and betrayal. Immediately a stranger within not only her own magnificent, sprawling mansion house but with the awkward and unexpected company her husband revels in, mother is treated appallingly, an objectified slave girl and servant demeaned as “She” and “Her” and “Not just a pretty face”. A medicinal potion ensures she keeps the discombobulating tremors and painful discomforts at bay as she stumbles from room to destroyed room of the Eden oasis she’d planned, before there was an unexpected knock at the door.
“Him” (Javier Bardem) Another career highlight for the Oscar winning man (sorry, “Him”) from the idyllic island of Gran Canaria in Spain. After working with Michael Mann (Collateral), the Coen Brothers (No Country for Old Men), Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Biutiful) and Sam Mendes (Skyfall), Bardem was Aronofsky’s distant, aloof and frighteningly interchangeable poet and writer consumed with writers block and the adulation and courting of a gushing, ego massaging audience. Far older than the mother he treats like a servant and takes for granted, he is a somewhat master manipulator in a grotesque power dynamic who (under Bardem’s masterful performance) dissolves from a smile into a scorn in a second, kind to callous in an instant. Unless the approval he so desperately seeks comes from the visitors unexpectedly knocking at his door to paradise.
“Woman” (Michelle Pfeiffer) and “Man” (Ed Harris) Startling, career high performances continue here with a hateful performance of detestable unlikableness from a horribly inappropriate Michelle Pfeiffer on top form, accompanied by the wheezing, near death and miraculous recoveries of her partner in abusive crime, Ed Harris. “I must be going” he announces before coughing and spluttering into another room before recovering Lazarus like to drag the besotted, lovelorn author away on a hike into a world we never see. “Why aren’t you pregnant?” the woman badgers and sneers at the mother, and owner of the house she’s taken over with her scorn and uncaring disregard for the paradise being created around her, and a paradise descending into hell.
“The poet says it’s everyone’s house” a stranger doth proclaim.
Everyone’s that is but the Mother Goddess aghast at the strangers now invited to stay “for as long as you want” and maybe, just maybe, they always have and maybe, they always will.
Mother! (deliberate use of the exclamation mark) is the devils and dust of life and death, birth and re-birth, and a house of unspeakable bloody horrors descending into the very depths of hell. The biblical tales are here but what is more starkly apparent are the angst ridden cries for help from a violently abused Mother Goddess, and an earth raped and pillaged as society descends into the abyss of its own violent and bloody creation.
I concluded my recent review of Aronofsky’s “The Whale” by stating that, on the grimness scale, his current Oscar nominated film ranks a little higher than “Black Swan” and just below “Requiem for a Dream”. “Mother!” pushes his year 2000 opus to obsessions, depression and destructive addictive compulsions very, very close as this is as grim as it gets, and way, way before a truly unspeakable act as we head towards the denouement of the film ensures we head, directly, and without passing go, into the very pits of the darkest hell imaginable.
Horribly grim. Highly recommended.
Mother!
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.