Darren Aronofsky’s Mother.
So just how bad is the new Darren Aronofsky film, Mother!? Well, and at the risk of bamboozling you with arcane technical jargon, it is what we in the industry refer to as pants. Which is extremely disappointing, because for a while Aronofsky seemed as if he might be the great white hope of independent cinema.
He made his impressive debut in 1998 with Pi, and followed it up two years later with the genuinely dazzling Requiem for a Dream. Here gloriously, form is content, and content form, as Beckett had defended Joyce with. The highly stylised exploration of the language and grammar of cinema was the perfect way to delve deep into the topic of addiction. The result was the film of the decade.
Jared Leto and Jennifer Connelly in Requiem for a Dream.
Next up was The Fountain in ’06. And, suffice it to say, we all put that film down to the immense pressure he must have been under to produce a worthy follow-up to what had come before. So he was forgiven that.
Then came The Wrestler in ’08. So okay, before earning the right to go back to making the sorts of films that he really wants to make, he needed to accommodate the bean counters in Hollywood. And as nice as it was seeing Mickey Rourke back on the silver screen, it really is little more than your runofthemill, feelgood Hollywood film.
The dream master, David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr.
But then came Black Swan, reviewed earlier here, a further a n other Hollywood picture. And then, worse again, Noah in ‘14 which couldn’t have been more Hollywood had it been directed by Cecil B DeMille and starred Charlton Heston. So just what kind of a film maker is Aronofsky?
Well let’s just hope that Mother! isn’t the answer to that question. True, for periods of ten, even fifteen minutes, the film trundles along inoffensively enough. And you begin to wonder what all the fuss is about. But then there’ll be a plot point, a quote development unquote in the ahem, story, that’s so implausible and so completely unconnected with what had gone on before, that your only response is an almost overpowering urge to get up and leave.
I don’t remember ever seeing a film that left me so permanently on the edge of my seat, about to leave, only to remain where I was on the assumption that any moment now, it was surely going to improve. It was like re-living the 2016 election night all over again.
Jodorowsky’s most recent pair of comeback films, Santa Sangre and the Dance of Reality.
For a while there, you wonder whether what’s being explored here might perhaps be some sort of dreamscape. But as Freud so memorably summed up, dreams are about “the transformation of manifest dream material into latent dream content”. The whole point of dreams and their reading in other words, is the connection between what you dream about, and the stuff of your everyday life. The different elements need to be connected, otherwise they are literally meaningless. And if what we’re being offered on the other hand is some sort of metaphor, allegory or parable, then we need to be able to identify with whoever it is that is experiencing the lesson to be learned.
There are no connections between the beginning, middle and end of Mother!, or for that matter, between any of its major scenes, and you couldn’t possibly identify with any of the characters involved. There are the same two principal actors, poor old Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem, on the same set, of the same house, and all the props are the same. But there is almost nothing to connect what happens in one scene with what happens in the next.
Fellini’s 8 1/2.
Dreams have been central to cinema, which is hardly surprising for a medium designed to produce illusion. Fellini’s 8 ½, Bunuel’s the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Polanski’s Repulsion and, more recently Alejandro Jodorowsky’s the Dance of Reality, reviewed earlier here, and, of course, David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., where, as David Thompson astutely pointed out, D R stands first and foremost for Dream, and only secondly for Drive.
If there are any of those films that you haven’t seen, do so now. If however you’re curious about what happens when you try to make a film without having a script or, therefore, a story, then if nothing else, Mother! will put you right on that.
Here’s the trailer to Mulholland Drive. And for the record, you can see the trailer to Mother here.
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