Mother F*cker

Movies: mother!

Welp. This certainly was a movie.

Darren Aronofsky's film mother! lives up to the hype of being unlike any movie I've seen before. It is balls-to-the-wall bat-shit insane, especially in its third act. I feel really bad for the poor kids sitting next to me who probably thought they were buying tickets to a scary movie starring Jennifer Lawrence.

Well, J. Law is definitely (literally) front and center during the entire movie, and, yes, parts of it are very horrifying. But this movie is so beyond any given genre or narrative that I don't know what people who didn't obsessively research the film (like me) before seeing it thought. They probably hated it.

If you want to go into mother! knowing nothing, please do so--but be warned that this movie is NOT for the faint of heart. There are a couple scenes that made me wonder how the hell the film ended up with an R rating instead of unrated or NC-17.

I'm going to go into total and complete spoilers below, so if you want to see the movie knowing nothing, stop reading now.

***

Jennifer Lawrence is a woman married to a much older man (Javier Bardem). The characters have no names. Bardem is a successful poet struggling with writer's block and Lawrence is a homemaker restoring their grand house, which is located in the middle of nowhere, without even a road or driveway leading up to it. The house was once nearly destroyed in a fire, and Lawrence takes great pleasure in restoring it.

One night there is a knock at the door: it is a man (Ed Harris, great as always) who claims he thought the house was a bed and breakfast. Bardem welcomes him in and asks him to spend the night, much to the consternation of Lawrence, who is unsettled by the stranger's presence.

But things get really strange the next day when the man's wife (Michelle Pfeiffer, excellent as a boozy cougar type) shows up at the door with luggage and everything. What the hell is going on? Did these two know about the house? And why are they so comfortable making themselves at home? The guests are verging on rude: Harris repeatedly smokes indoors, despite Lawrence's request he take it outside; Pfeiffer point blank asks Lawrence why she hasn't had children yet ("Is it him, or...?" she rudely inquires about the couple's fertility). Lawrence is incredibly annoyed...while Bardem seems 100% comfortable with the strange guests.

THEN their two sons show up. Played by real life brothers Brian and Domhnall Gleeson, the two young men *immediately* begin fighting until one of them kills the other.

Ok pause for a second. Did I mention that Ed Harris' character has a bruised/broken rib. And that he and Pfeiffer break into Bardem's study and touch/break an object they're specifically told not to touch? And they have two sons...one that kills the other in anger...

Are we getting the picture yet? Well, if you spent your Sundays the way I did growing up, you may have figured it out by now.

Anyway, after the son kills the other son, Bardem allows the man and wife to bring their friends over to help them grieve. Then a party breaks out. All of this to the absolute horror of Lawrence, who literally mopped up a dead guy's blood earlier.

She screams and begs these people to leave her home. They don't, and, in fact, one of them calls her an "arrogant cunt", and two others sit on her kitchen sink, which promptly breaks away from the wall and starts a flood of water.

A flood? hmmm...

Finally, they leave. Bardem and Lawrence fight, then fuck, and then magically she wakes up pregnant. And the couple have peace and quiet for about 9 months.

But THEN Bardem writes his next great poem. Word spreads quickly and on a special night where Lawrence cooks her husband a beautiful dinner for just the two of them, a bunch of Bardem's fans show up at the door.

And THIS is when shit gets wild. Over the next 30 minutes of the film, more and more people stream into the home as Lawrence begs them to leave and begins to experience contractions. The fans are literally worshipful of Bardem--begging him to touch them and creating icons with his picture. They begin taking parts of the home ("to prove we were here" one explains) and literally destroying the house. Total chaos reigns. The cops show up. They pepper spray people. Rioters show up. Terrorists show up and start killing people. The house looks like a war zone. And Lawrence goes into labor and finally gives birth in Bardem's study.

If you've been tracking the metaphor, you've realized at this point that mother! is a retelling of the creation story of Genesis, with Bardem as God and Lawrence as Mother Nature. She's not happy about her husband letting Mankind overrun her beautiful paradise. But it's only about to get worse. She's just given birth to God's Son.

What happens to God's Son in the Bible?

As Lawrence holds their newborn son in her arms, her husband tells her that the crowd outside wants to see him. She refuses. But when she falls asleep, she awakens to realize that he has taken the baby and is showing him off to the cheering masses. But then someone takes the baby and begins passing him around the crowd. Lawrence is apoplectic.

And then you hear a snap.

And then...take and eat, this is my body given to you.

YUP. A BABY GETS EATEN IN THIS MOVIE.

Which makes complete sense given the plot.

Lawrence, who has been screaming the whole movie, screams in agony to see her son's body being consumed by the crowd. When she tries to stop them, they beat the living fuck out of her, calling her a whore. Because that's what Mother Nature is to Mankind: a whore to beat, rape, and kill. Given to us by a loving God.

Meanwhile, her husband begs her: "we can't let his death mean nothing. We have to forgive them!"

Lawrence ain't having none of that. She crawls to the basement with a lighter. She spills oil from the furnace to the ground. She lights up. And the house explodes.

But Bardem isn't done using her yet. He is unharmed, while she is badly burned. The last thing he does is remove her heart from her dying body and molds it into a crystal (identical to one Adam and Eve...whoops, I mean Harris and Pfeiffer...break in his study, earlier). This crystal heals the home, helping it rise from the ashes...and then we see a new young woman--a different actress--wake up in their bed and call for Bardem. The cycle has begun again.

***

Ok, so that's the plot. I was really of two minds about this film: on the one hand, it's insanely pretentious and really on the nose. We get it, Aronofsky: you believe that people are shit who have destroyed the earth. You're right! We ARE shit. Human beings are shit. We rape, kill, plunder.

Aronofsky apparently also believes that God Himself is the Ultimate Shit because He created us and allowed us to murder and eat his son and beat up his wife--all for a little glory. I dunno, maybe Aronofsky is onto something. Based on some of the ways I've seen "Christians" behave toward their fellow man, it wouldn't surprise me to find out they're actually worshipping a big Asshole in the sky. There are a few Christians I know who are really good people, but there are a lot who would murder, rape, and torture their fellow man in a heartbeat if they believed their God told them to do it. Heck, some of them are already doing just that!

So, Aronofsky has a bone to pick with humans and with God, and pick it he does, in a pretentious and silly way in mother!

BUT. On the other hand. The sheer fucking audacity of this movie. The speed at which things escalate. It truly feels like you, the audience, are trapped inside a nightmare. Things don't make sense, time skips forward, the walls bleed.

This isn't unusual for an Aronofsky film. From Pi to Requiem for a Dream to Black Swan, his films include various dreamlike elements that verge on insanity. mother! just dials it up to eleven.

And, although the film really punches you in the face with its message, I have to admit I kind of loved the idea of taking the Bible and turning it into psychological horror from the perspective of Mother Nature. It's the ultimate taboo: it's one thing to say you don't believe in God and it's quite another to suggest that God is actually self-obsessed, sadistic, and dismissive of those who give Him everything. But, there's Biblical precedent for that point of view: just read the Old Testament to see God murdering every motherfucker in sight! He creates the world and Man, and then He's like "fuck this shit, these human are terrible!" and wipes us all out. Meanwhile, Mother Earth is trying to grow fruit and flowers and little fuzzy bunnies and Mankind is like...shitting all over it! If I was Her, I'd blow the world to hell too!

So, I really have to hand it to Aronofsky. He has directed a movie that whether you love it or hate it, you are GOING to feel *something* about it and you are going to talk about it. I've seen some news items that are calling mother! "the worst film of 2017", which is hilariously and provably wrong. The Emoji Movie is obviously the worst movie of 2017 because a film like that doesn't fucking try. mother! on the other hand, tries. It tries really, really hard to say something and be something and make you feel something. And I don't care what anyone says, that's the definition of art.

mother! may be pretentious trash. It may be a "feast of filth". It may be a wild scream into the void. But it most certainly is one thing: a work of art.

Grade: A-