Mother
More appropriately titled “Take A Passive Journey Through A Privileged White Woman’s Struggle To Get Disadvantaged People Out of Her Suburban Home,” this quasi-Biblical, quasi-cautionary relationship and anti-fame tale drudges through an endless array of Snorricam shots and “Rosemary’s Baby” references that lead you to a forced conclusion that any rails-based game would envy. While there’s a lot this movie does very well, it was simply too vague to make the kind of impact it sought to make.
This is a well-known technique: make a movie whose premise and point are nebulous enough that anyone can assign meaning to it. No one is better at this than Sofia Coppola. The movie built tension, because nothing happened: you would sit on drawn-out compositions with a noticeably quiet soundtrack, and get pummeled by overused jump-scares that had the unintentional byproduct of distancing yourself from the plight of the main character.
And Jennifer Lawrence, for all she’s worth, pulled a major Keanu Reeves manoeuvre here, in that we are watching her be entirely knocked about by her environment – without any regard to her own will or sense of autonomy. It was like sitting inside of VR simulation where you don’t know the controls, and you’re getting pissed at your avatar for not moving in the direction you want but merely flops against the wall in an effort to do something as simple as enter a doorway.
I was curious how many pages of the script there’d be if we condensed all the times Jennifer Lawrence says, “Hey! Wait!” Her performance was still good, which may sound like a contradiction, but she emoted in masterful ways. But no amount of technique or turmeric water (you’ll get it if you see the film) was going to save her ass from a shoddy script.
I appreciate the symbolism within the film, but it was over the top – to the extent that it created immense boredom. However, by the end of the first shot, I knew this was going to be some mobius-strip kind of shit, and I’m terrible at predicting this stuff. By the end of the first 30 minutes, it was obvious we were being subjected to the heavy hand of religious stories – although I’m not sure WHICH stories.
The scenarios danced from Jesus to Adam and Eve to Joseph and Mary to Moses, etcetera…I’m assuming that Aranovsky thought rewriting Noah’s portion of “Genesis” wasn’t enough and he had to have a hand in bastardising the other portions of the Good Book.
There are definitely things that make people naturally squirm, and Hollywood has it down to a science. But that isn’t good filmmaking. I can have musical notes played that will force the hairs on your neck to stand up; that doesn’t make me a musician.
All-in-all, I don’t think the film was terrible, but I can’t think of much that was worth seeing. The cinematography was particularly ugly, and I found myself vacillating between leaving and trying to give it the benefit of the doubt. If I had this to do over, I would probably have left. See it at your own risk