Oh, Mother!

I put off watching Mother! because I knew the premise. Now I'm watching it will a full understanding of what means what and what the allegory is and it's still not such a great movie. So far. Shaky cam is making it hard for me to actually physically watch it. I know it gets gory which was the other reason I was put off. 

You could identify with the essence of giving too much to those who hurt you. J-Law's not doing a bad job of this but she's coming off as the beleaguered hostess who can't say no. So I'm sure it'll become annoying and less sympathetic.

Walking into this movie blind would make it more interesting. Considering the "plot" it's supposed to be taking, there's been some confusing turns. Michelle Pfeiffer seems pretty right for the part the director's written for her but a damning indictment on the actual character she's meant to be. Javier Bardem works in his role so I don't know which direction they'll take his character in. I wasn't paying enough attention to realise he's a poet so when he finishes his masterpiece I had it in my head it's a novel. It's still hard to watch it without going "do ya get it?" after seeing Red Letter Media's review. But I'm curious about the ending so I'm in it for the long haul. I can't remember what I read on Wikipedia.

I changed my mind, it probably pays to know who's who because some of the plot points are silly enough that if you don't know what's going on it comes off as plain ridiculous. It makes it interesting in a way, but sort of comical at points when I think it's meant to be taken seriously. So I'm trying not to laugh at shit I probably shouldn't find funny. It is kind of a fifth grader's understanding of the narrative. Or maybe I'm missing something. It's trying to be clever and it's not really achieving this. Throwaway lines about the Apocalypse are relatively amusing but trite. Now that shit's amping up it's definitely getting ridiculous and not at all subtle. It's at peak "calm your tits" right now and it's got 20 minutes left. I didn't find Kristen Wiig's character all that funny or clever either, she represents Herald, since each character is referenced as a key character but not by their actual biblical names. It may have looked smarter on paper. Not by the dialogue.

I've been flipping my television off for the last 20 minutes. It's ham-fisted and not at all subtle. Or even clever. It got a slow clap and a no from me, Dawg.

I saw this was nominated for some awards by the Alliance of Women Film Journalists and thought, oh, the feminists dig on this. Until I saw the list of nominations:

Most Egregious Age Difference Between The Lead and The Love Interest Award  to the two leads

Actress Most in Need Of A New Agent to J-Law

AND....

AWFJ Hall of Shame Award to the director.

Aww, considering he was trying to make a sympathetic portrayal of Mother Earth I'd say this confirms the boy dun fucked up.

It also went up for Golden Raspberries, again the three above all earning nominations (a double whammy for Javier that year for Pirates too). I'm actually more shocked by that to be honest.

I don't think I've seen many Darren Aronofsky movies outside Requiem and Black Swan, and I wasn't a fan of the latter like most people were. I found Black Swan not all that subtle either and Natalie Portman putting in effort to look balletic and convincing is commendable but the rest of the acting was, to me, over the top. A lot of guys seem to like her performance outside of the lesbian stuff. It just didn't strike me as that captivating. Aronofsky definitely looks like a pretty smug guy who was given too many props.

I knew this movie would bother me later. Primarily, conflating Mother Nature with Mother Mary when the bible itself makes no direct reference to Mother Nature. It has Grecian origins and ended up more a pagan concept. Catholics call Mary the Queen of Heaven, so for artistic lisence I'm assuming Aronofsky conflated the two for the purpose of his narrative, which is ironically cyclical, perhaps to point at history repeating and man being doomed to forever commit the same mistakes for all time. Or that God himself will keep trying until he gets a good batch of humans but keeps forgetting them being shitheads the last time, so he falls in love with them all over again. The stupid thing is also, the God analogy in Bardem's portrayal seems woefully ignorant of his creations. He's more, hey I found these people wandering around and took pity on them, not "they're here because of me". So this version of God has no omniscience or omnipresence to know what the fuck is going on when he's not in the same room as Mother. He should fucking know what's going on and not be bemused or astonished to find her upset or beaten. He should've known she was up the duff from their one fuck session. It's garbled. Man and Woman (who comes off more like her predecessor Lillith but still reeks of internalised, Christian misogyny that it was ALL Woman's/Eve's fault they were kicked out) are still in the house (Paradise) when they should be out in the fucking fields fucking. They're not. The two sons are played off as assholes rather than one being more pious than the other, as if to still confuse us over which son was which. It's all so horribly in your face by the end of it, mostly with the torture of Mother and the consumption of the child. Oh, yes. We get it. The Body and the Blood. We GET it. Man sucks. Man is greedy. Man takes and while Mother gives and gives ad nauseam. Seriously. Too much. I think this could've been done on a subtle level. Not with an actual fucking mushroom cloud when Paradise explodes from Mother finally going nuclear. The earth caving in on itself and swallowing it down into Hell makes way more sense but clearly we had to throw a "man made the bomb/Apocalypse" analogy instead. Like I said, mixed metaphors and garbled logic. Because, from what I understand, the story kept changing during its conception. So some holes popped up along the way.