If that’s a reference to my last post, I apologize. I put spoiler tags in, although I guess it’s too late for you. Sorry.
mother! is about as serious as any overblown allegorical art film. Which is that it thinks it’s serious, but is just absurd.
Yeah, I get it. But it’s also a lot more serious and “adult” in tone. I know comparing the intent in one versus the other is a weird academic exercise, but IT is a kid’s movie if you subtract all the f-bombs and the wee bit of gore in the beginning. mother! is anything but a kids movie.
I enjoyed this one, I found it interesting and thought-provoking and although I may end up concluding the execution is of mixed quality I am glad I went to see it.
To be honest through the movie I never even considered the Mother Earth / God / Adam / Eve allegory going on. I can definitely see that now, to the point where it’s obvious this is at least one layer of what the director had in mind. I don’t think it’s everything though. Other people point to the nature of artists being alternately creative/destructive and I think that’s another thread.
When I watched it I thought it’s message was about sexism and how men can suck the lives out of women.
- JLaw is on the receiving end of pretty much every sexist thought and action throughout the movie (why don’t you wear something decent, why don’t you want kids, she has to wait on everyone and never gets appreciation, people just leave after the mess is made, Bardem gets all the credit for the hospitality, and then later on when she gets aggressively propositioned and called hateful sexist words, you see all the women kept in the cages, she’s beaten up, etc.). I don’t how the sexism in the movie can be reconciled to her as a stand-in for mother earth and the house as nature.
- The man does alot less work than the woman (bardem has writers block while JLaw is fixing the entire house), yet still receives all of the praise and admiration from outside observers. When it goes surrealist they even start a religion around him.
- She has very little agency or control over anything the entire movie. The guests won’t listen to her, her husband obviously cares for her but doesn’t realise the effect his decisions have over her own life, and then towards the end she can’t even protect her baby from the outside world/ideas.
- I took the surrealist half of the movie to be JLaw’s descent into madness after stopping from taking her ‘medicine’ after getting pregnant. Severe mental illness perhaps?
- The whole crystal thing to me represented the life of a woman subjugated by a man. The cyclical aspect of it represents how it’s been endlessly repeated throughout human history to countless women.
- They have a child as a way to try and fix the relationship but as always makes things worse.
- Nevertheless, I thought it also cast Bardem in a somewhat sympathetic light (given the above), as he obviously cares about JLaw and just wanted to bring in outside ideas. I thought when he told her he felt suffocated being alone in the house with her was telling.
I’m just going to leave the RLM review here, which I enjoyed far more than I suspect I’d enjoy this movie.
This movie felt like a mix between Rosemaries Baby (the “neighbours”, the medicine, the complicity of Javier with the others, the pregnancy, paranoia ) and a mostly unknown movie from Peter Greenaway, The Baby of Macon (where a child is eaten by a religious mob) … I always was reminded of those films thematically, visually they do not relate, and mother is quite boring from a visual perspective (for me at least)… It is missing the sublime humor from Rosemaries Baby and the depth from the Baby of Macon, though. My check for a movie is always: do I want to rewatch it? And I have to say, no, there is nothing in it I want to experience again. I did not like the characters, the overall construction was a bit dull, the sound was excellent, but sparse.
I enjoyed The Fountain and Pi, and I rewatched The Fountain a couple of times, it is missing humor, but I can enjoy it very much (also it had great music) … here, everything is a bit dry, isn’t it?
p.s. it had some kafkaesque moments, for what it’s worth…
Whoa, great comparison. Mother felt like Aronofsky trying to do Peter Greenaway!
Glad to hear you call that out. Rosemary’s Baby can be wickedly funny. I am so in love with the moment at the end when Ruth Gordon fusses over the mark the knife makes on the floor.
-Tom
uh, it also reminded me of Monty Python and the deadly-joke … where a joke kills people by laughing to death.
This I found cheap, the deadly poem or to be precise, the mob-attracting-poem … Someone like Borges could have made a great short story about an author, writing a poem that will attract a fan-mob finally killing him, maybe he did …
but it did not work on the big screen (for me) … if you want to start a religion, please, at least walk over water or something
I saw this tonight with my girlfriend. It was disturbing, hard to watch, and overall, thought provoking in a way that means I’ll have to see it again. Without knowing much I picked up on some of the biblical allegory but not the mother earth allegory (which makes sense, in some strange way.)
But man, talk about anxiety producing scenes and hard to watch sections. So much more than a typical suspense and so much more affecting than a typical horror, intertwining the two in a slowly building dark and crazed vision. I can see why audiences are split and why some just flat out hate the movie.
I don’t even know what I would rate it at this point because I’m still trying to process what I saw. Films don’t typically leave me that way.
Here is Mother pwned by The Shining!
Jennifer Lawrence chats with Adam Sandler about the challenges of avoiding reviews while also being a supportive partner to your boyfriend/director during a press tour.
It’s taken several viewings of Sandler’s serious movies to get to a place where I can watch that clip and not expect he’s going to start YELLING AT ANY MOMENT FOR COMEDIC EFFECT.
Also, every time I see Sandler, I’m a little sad for how much better Inglorious Basterds could have been.
-Tom
In that still, Adam Sandler looks like Charles de Gaulle.
I would love to see Jennifer Lawrence interviewed by Charles de Gaulle.
Did Sandler drop out to essentially play a version of himself in Funny People?
Eli Roth certainly felt like a bit of a weak link compared to the rest of the excellent ensemble cast. Apparently the “Bear Jew” character originally had a considerably expanded role in the film, including a lengthy New York flashback (it would occur during the Nazi integrations in chapter 2), which would explain the origins of his baseball bat, but it was cut along with a Maggie Cheung scene, as the movie theater owner, after the mixed reception to the Cannes premiere. That said, I quite like the hilarious Zollar propaganda movie, Nation’s Pride, that Roth directed so maybe the trade off was worth it?
Do I smell an Oscarbait biopic?
Hey, you just made me kinda like something Eli Roth directed! That’s a sensation I’ve only experienced once before.
-Tom
Just noticed this is on Amazon Prime Streaming now so I took the time to watch it today. The film left me ashamed to be a human being, but I’m over that feeling now.
The film did leave me with one question though, what’s up with the cyclical nature of events? I don’t understand how that ties in to everything else, given the underlying source material.
I’ve also never seen Jennifer Lawrence in anything before, so I just realized that I totally love her face. I’ve only seen her on movie posters and stuff but never really paid her much attention.
You should watch Winter’s Bone.
Then watch Silver Lining Playbook
Then watch that movie where she’s a naked smurf that can turn into other people.
This.