mother! (2017)

[filmlover]

This is the most bonkers movie I have ever seen in theaters. I don't know how this got made. Hopefully one day we get a tape or something of the pitch meeting between Paramount and Darren Aronofsky in which the former agreed to give the latter an eight figure deal to make this. I have never seen a movie prompt so many walkouts like this one did (some vocal in their disapproval on the way out).

 

Personally, I thought this was easily the biggest disappointment of 2017 so far. I'm just gonna name what I liked and didn't like about it.

 

First, the good. The first half works pretty well. The scenes of Jennifer Lawrence (very good, but not one of my favorite performances from hers) walking around the house alone have a very claustrophobic feel to them. And the performances are very good all around. Javier Bardem is fantastic and I thought he was better than Lawrence, though he doesn't get to do as much acting as she's asked to. Ed Harris is very good with the little he's given, and Michelle Pfeiffer kills it in her handful of scenes. I also enjoyed Kristen Wiig's cameo too.

 

Now, the not so good, and where the movie completely lost me. The second half arrives, and all insanity breaks loose. We get a lot of really shocking violence as an apocalypse plays out in this couple's home. It all feels like it should mean something. And yet...it doesn't feel like it means anything. It's just horrifying images thrown onto the screen (fully expecting someone to answer "you didn't get it!" to this criticism, to which I say don't bother). I didn't feel any kind of connection to the characters on screen. And if I don't care for what's happening on screen, there is a problem. If Aronofsky's goal was to make a completely off-putting and inaccessible arthouse movie, he has succeeded.

 

Heading out of the theater, I hated the movie with a deep and fiery passion. But on the drive home, it grew on me a bit, and I overall appreciated that Aronofsky attempted something so far from the norm. For better or for worse, this is not a movie I will be forgetting any time soon. But just because I admired what he set out to do does not mean I have to like the final result itself, and I didn't. This is a curious misfire from a filmmaker who I highly respect, easily his weakest film to date in my opinion, that I have no intention of ever revisting.

 

C+

Edited September 17, 2017 by filmlover

[Hiccup23]

Ummmmm not sure what to think about this film. It really dragged on and on. I feel asleep half way through. The third act though was fantastic and I loved that part. Everything before it was meh.

 

C-

[DeeCee]

Brilliant. Simply, brilliant. 

 

Edited September 17, 2017 by DeeCee

[vc2002]

Is this the most devided-opinion movie on this site? The reviews go from one of the best of the year (A+)  to  total dogshit (F-)

 

 

[Hiccup23]

I can't stop thinking about this movie. Fuck...it gets better the more I think about it and analyze it. I'm raising my original grade to a B+

Edited September 18, 2017 by Hiccup23

[filmlover]

2 hours ago, vc2002 said:

Is this the most devided-opinion movie on this site? The reviews go from one of the best of the year (A+)  to  total dogshit (F-)

 

 

I think, no matter what you think of this movie, it's bound to get a reaction of some kind from everyone who watches it and will stick with you long after. There's no getting some of the more disturbing moments out of my memory. 

[Gopher]

Silly to read people use phrases like crazy, striking or polarizing as negatives. mother! is all of those things and we're better off for it, we need movies that can provoke and divide and we can wrestle with. 

 

The movie is a ton of fun - the two 'ensemble' sequences are deliriously paced and heightened, and my favorite parts of the film. I ultimately had trouble separating Aronofsky (who wrote the movie as a response to his divorce from Rachel Weitz) from Bardem's character, and felt the movie's intentions were a little confused. The religious allegories particularly fall flat for me - the film has better success when its allusions aren't so on the nose. But I can't say I was bored for a minute. Couldn't possibly give it a rating, or even say I loved it, but it's a must-see.

[Kvikk Lunsj]

I did not like. Darren worst film. He should have spent longer writing the screenplay. It seemed mishandled and kept hitting your head with a same message.  The acting was good and it was well edited and the visuals were nice. 

2/5. 

[The Dark Alfred]

I think Darren did the utmost with the subject matter. The message wasn't unique, but quite clear. It sums up the current state of things in our society. It's dark but funny as well and the camerawork and editing is Oscar-worthy. It gets under your skin. The fact that people hate and dislike this film with passion and some with anger further proves that it is art-house cinema at its best.

[Xillix]

Liked it, didn't love it, definitely respect it. Was nice to see something so anxious and disturbing after It completely failed to scare me. Overstuffed? Yeah. Pretentious? Probably. Nonsensical? In a literal interpretation yes, but it's obviously not meant to be taken literally at all. Great acting and technical merits. Parts of the climax felt a little unintentionally silly to me.

 

3.5 / 5 or B

 

As to comparisons with It Comes at Night; yeah, both are pretentious arthouse films mismarketed to general horror audiences. The reason I think Mother! is pretty good and It Comes at Night is dogshit is because It Comes at Night was boring as hell, nothing happened, none of it was scary, it was a slow slog, and there was neither a literal story with enough material to last longer than like 30 minutes nor any sort of actual metaphor. Mother! feels like it was written in five days, which it was. It Comes at Night feels like a summary of it was written in a few hours and then no one actually wrote a script.

[Goffe]

I was enraged by Jlaw’s passiveness even if I understood that was within her character. It makes the movie’s first segment, which is before she gets pregnant, feel long as fuck.

 

I also went knowing mother! was a religious allegory, but couldn’t quite connect the dots until the crowd broke the baby’s neck. That was a bit frustrating at first, but after sleeping on it, I’m kinda strangely happy with that aspect of the movie?

 

Didn’t get the point of that shakey camera trick they used whenever the focus was on someone.

 

Anyway, mother! feels very much like a masterpiece even though I didn’t like it much.

[baumer]

So is a movie brilliant because it takes a concept that is known, like the Bible, and then disguises it and uses allegory?  Is that the definition of brilliance?  I think that's a really poor excuse for brilliance.

[Barnack]

1 hour ago, Stutterng baumer Denbrough said:

So is a movie brilliant because it takes a concept that is known, like the Bible, and then disguises it and uses allegory?  Is that the definition of brilliance?  I think that's a really poor excuse for brilliance.

I don't think movie brilliance is in the high concept it chose or the tool (here using biblical myth shortcut with audience to tell a story), but how it does it (The Matrix is not brilliant because it use the Plato cave allegory, but the nice way it did it, well even if the concept in the Matrix make no sense at all it is still fun and brilliant imo).

Edited September 24, 2017 by Barnack

[JohnnY]

I'm still not sure how to rate this movie. I need to watch it a second time because I feel like I don't agree with some of the things it tries to imply. I remember watching Melancholia and loving it, only to start hating it after the movie became clearer to me on a second view. Curiously, the opposite happened to Tree of Life, I really disliked it at first and then I fell in love with it.

 

I did have a good time watching it, I was far from bored, but I hardly think this is groundbreaking. Lars Von Trier, Jodorowsky, Ingmar Bergman, Lynch and Terrence Malick all made movies that were either more gruesome or more allegorical/psychedelic than this. There's literally nothing in this movie that is shocking or complex in a way people have never seen before. Hell, this is the guy that directed Pi and The Fountain, he used to do "artsy stuff", aren't people over reacting? I suppose the movie is shocking to people who are used to Hollywood blockbusters and Oscar baits, and I'm sure that JLaw and the marketing ended up attracting a lot of people who expect something completely different. That's probably where all the "this movie made no sense, it's a piece of trash" reviews are coming from. Negative critics about it being excessively allegorical in order to pose as an arthouse movie are valid imo, though.

Edited September 26, 2017 by JohnnY

[Blankments]

mother! feels a nightmare in every sense. Aronofsky's twisted vision might be overtly obvious at points, but it never bores. Lawrence delivers her best performance yet as the titular character, and the rest of the cast is no slouch either. That said, it's a movie that annoys as much as it fascinates, coming off as profoundly silly and remarkably stupid a lot of the runtime. However, mother! never fails to captivate the audience through the disturbing images thrown on screen, bringing the spirit of morality plays to life in a way that's much more entertaining if you throw out the banal allegory. A very flawed but very intriguing film. B-

[CJohn]

I have no clue what is this.

[WrathOfHan]

1 hour ago, CJohn said:

I have no clue what is this.

 

[filmlover]

17 hours ago, CJohn said:

I have no clue what is this.

Guys I think Aronofsky broke CJohn.

[trifle]

On 9/24/2017 at 9:47 AM, Goffe said:

 

 

I also went knowing mother! was a religious allegory, but couldn’t quite connect the dots until the crowd broke the baby’s neck. That was a bit frustrating at first, but after sleeping on it, I’m kinda strangely happy with that aspect of the movie?

 

I thought the baby was unnecessary and the Biblical allegory of communion was outright distracting from the environmental message of Mother Earth being destroyed by man's actions until I saw an Aronofsky interview with the Wall Street Journal yesterday.  Apparently,  the baby reference came to him because while he was writing mother! a baby dolphin was swept up on a beach in South America and people mobbed it, petting it and taking pictures with with it and killed it in their excitement and enthusiasm.

On 9/24/2017 at 3:05 PM, Stutterng baumer Denbrough said:

So is a movie brilliant because it takes a concept that is known, like the Bible, and then disguises it and uses allegory?  Is that the definition of brilliance?  I think that's a really poor excuse for brilliance.

I'm really not that used to movies like this, but I got the impression it wasn't so much that he was using allegory FOR the Bible, but that he was USING the Bible as short hand to convey his message that all this destruction is going on is at the hands of Man as a species, destroying Paradise, rather than at the hands of some random individuals.  Putting the refugees, and soldiers, and riots and everything into one house, was also to convey that there is only one world where all of these things are happening and we should all be concerned with all of it, not just disinterested because it is going on 'on the other side' of the world, not our part.

 

As Jen put it in one interview "There is only one world, it is all of our sink, so stop bouncing on it!"

 

I posted these pictures initially in the movie thread then deleted them because the spoiler tag didn't hide them.  So this is the closest place I have to a spoiler thread!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's amazing to me that they literally filmed all of these people in the confines of that house!

 

Edited October 1, 2017 by trifle

[Cochofles]

The more I think about this film, the more I liked it.

Yep...it made me feel...I know it sounds incredibly cliched, but here's the thing: we are so used to uber-polished, uber-generic "feelings" in film, epecially when it comes to the musical cues and the ploty contrivances designed to make us feel a certain way, that those emotions feel...meh...unearned.

This film made me uncomfortable...uneasy...even sick-ish, and the last act totally destroyed me. 

Not a film I would buy on DVD to watch often, but it was certainly a movie that compelled me enough to re-watch it in cinemas.

And I still have it under my skin.

So yeah, to me, it was a fantastic moviegoing experience pretty much because it was unforgettable.

DOes that make sense? It does to me.