First of all, just don’t bother reading anything anyone says about Mother! before you’ve seen it yourself. I made that mistake, and I regret it. I’m about to spoil the shit out of this movie, and I don’t care, but if you’re someone who does, consider yourself warned.
Let me start by telling you what I believe this film is NOT:
A) Dauntingly complex. I know the size of this review makes this seem contradictory, but bear with me. So, right after this film came out, there were hoards of people just chomping at the bit to tell us that, “Javier Bardem is god, and Jennifer Lawrence is kind of mother earth…I think?” I saw this in several allegedly spoiler-free reviews. The legitimacy of this claim became excruciatingly apparent very, very early on, but I really think I would have picked up on this 15-30 minutes into the film. That could be because I actively look for religious metaphor in film, and even though I would have only been utterly confused for a short time, I would have loved to have come to this realization myself, because that’s a very different feeling. Once you get the basic premise of the allegory in Mother!, the plot (which would otherwise seem illogical and bizarre) actually becomes somewhat predictable. Not so much in regards to each individual plot point though. The suspense lies in HOW the film is going to choose to portray these allegorical events, and each is wildly inventive and entertaining. Still, after seeing the film, you’re not likely to be left with “what just happened?”, but rather, “What did X and Y mean, and how did they serve the allegory?”
B) Torture porn, or anything at all like the trailer. I understand that for every strange, difficult-to-classify film, there is a perplexed marketing department at a movie studio somewhere that will likely be missing a few employees by the time box office numbers for the first month are in. I get that Mother! isn’t the easiest film to classify. After seeing the trailer, and realizing this was an Aronofsky film, I expected a bit of false advertising, but did they have to go THAT far? Based on the trailer alone, I was expecting Saw-like violence (and by that, I mean the entire Saw franchise outside of the first film). There are scenes in that trailer that make it appear as if Jennifer Lawrence has just encountered Jigsaw, and is going to have to play a game, and just maybe Javier Bardem is going to remove every inch of skin from her body and force her to crawl through an obstacle course of razors, hooks, and feces. This is, of course, not the case. In fact, the only shocking violence in the film is the almost-hilarious Christ allegory at the end. Being a gore-hound, I was actually a little disappointed by this, but I can’t really say the film suffered because of it. The trailer also seemed to point to a big Sixth Sense-esque twist. That doesn’t happen. While I’m sure a trailer like this felt necessary to market Mother! to a mass audience, I don’t think it needed to go this far. The film was going to be divisive anyway, but now you’ve got a trailer that is both going to alienate the kind of film snobs that would enjoy this movie in the first place, and rabidly anger those who came for either the gore or the appearance of a mildly-cerebral plot that will make everyone feel good about themselves when they guess the twist halfway through. Without this awful trailer, I don’t think the backlash would have been nearly as bad as it was.
C) Utter trash, or the greatest film ever made I get the anger, I really do. I can completely understand why a film critic or your average Joe is going to walk out of this movie furious. You could easily argue that it relies entirely too heavily on its allegory, and that it feels like an empty shell of a film because of this. There are also people who aren’t going to immediately grasp this movie’s style of storytelling.
This leads to me to what this movie IS.
Mother! is structured in a way I have never quite seen before, at least to my immediate recollection. The allegory is so important to what is happening on-screen that it becomes its own meta-narrative, and yet this meta-narrative feels so separate from each event in the story-line that I can see how someone could feel alienated from the movie almost immediately. In my opinion, the only real elements that save Mother! from feeling heavy-handed are the characters and the way they are treated. A lesser film would get caught up in packing in as much symbolism and references to religion as possible, but this one goes out of its way to develop the relationship between Lawrence and Bardem, to actually make us feel empathy for Lawrence (and in turn mother nature), and to view Bardem as a tragically-flawed deity who has made some awful and absurd decisions and is in some ways trapped in a hell of his own making. I honestly cannot think of another film that so forcefully asks us to re-evaluate our own views on the nature of a deity and the way we treat the earth, and in such a unique way. It manages to touch on so many points in such a short time, and its message feels not only interesting, but important. I can’t even remember the last time I felt the need to describe a film as “important.”
Just kidding, that was Blade Runner 2049.
Still…
9/10
Oh yeah, this movie also contains some innovative and interesting camerawork.