MOTHER!: Wife Material

Director: Darren Aronofsky
Writer: Darren Aronofsky
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer, Brian Gleeson, Domhnall Gleeson, Kristen Wiig
Runtime: 121 mins.
2017

A man and a woman make a home together. Their labors do not fall equally. The man is the worker, the breadwinner, the tortured genius, the star, the hero, the subject. The woman works too, but it is a labor of love. She is the caretaker, the homemaker, the bearer of life, the vessel of inspiration, the enabler, the sustenance, the muse, the object.

These are the brigade of gender norms that make up the steel trap of the perfectly titled mother!. In this movie director Darren Aronofsky has created a... fairy tale? allegory? parable? domestic drama?... about the infinite patriarchal cycle of husband and wife. This is the kind of film to achieve an F on Cinemascore, and it has very knowingly earned its ghastly marks. I can only imagine the revolting experience mother! must have been for those more literal minded folks looking for a good scare. To give you some idea of the level of abstraction at play, the script eschews character names in favor of titles: Mother, Him, Man, Woman, Cupbearer, Consoler, Whisperer, Zealot, Defiler, Lingerer, Devotee, Novitiate, Herald.

As with every aspect of mother!, the curious naming conceit is not merely meant to inflame. Every choice has a clear, ringing purpose. In this case, not only does the namelessness boost what is being represented into a more conceptual space, but it eradicates the humanity of the film's characters, replacing identity with a mythic social role.


mother!'s atmosphere is suffused with the mundane, the everyday. An indefinable tension permeates every frame nonetheless, born in part from the film's staunch refusal to score itself with anything but an occasional chime. Slowly but surely strangeness begins to creep into the domestic landscape, accruing and contorting until it builds into an excruciating climax that had me teary-eyed and mouth-agape from its sheer punishing monstrosity.

Guiding us along this path is Jennifer Lawrence's Mother. I feel assured in calling this the best work of her career, in part because she is so aggressively playing against type. Lawrence has made a career for herself as an agent of defiance. Although she has such moments in mother!, her dominant mode is demure and repressed. Despite the ambiguous unreality of her being, as made apparent from the hypersymbolic opening scene, the film sticks relentlessly with Mother throughout its runtime, battering us with constant close-ups of her distress, confusion, or self-abnegation. We suffocate in her perspective, as the film uses its prim aesthetic ugliness to further evoke the claustrophobia of subservient domesticity.

Matthew Libatique's cinematography and Philip Messina's production design are not to be overlooked, but the real standout is Paula Fairfield's sound design. The clamor of every footfall in the creaky old house becomes a mind-gnawing rhythm, the groans of the foundation punctuating it with dread. Apparently Jóhann Jóhannsson wrote a discarded score for the film, instead helping Aronofsky craft an ambient soundscape that ebbs and flows just outside the bounds of our attention. The great attention put into the audiovisual construction of the home space has enormous payoff, as the film only works if we come to believe that the house is a living thing in its own right.

The resulting work of art is a stunning entanglement of interpretations and sensations. Aronofsky's willfully abrasive vision is singular and uncompromising. Yet the meaning surrounding the narrative proliferates rather than settles. I honed in on the gender dynamics, but it is just as much a film about frenetic religious fervor, or environmental decay, or the catastrophe of celebrity. mother! plays like my deepest nightmares. I cannot in good conscience recommend it without the disclaimer that you are likely to hate it. The film hits hard, and sometimes our most essential media is also the most off-putting.

4.5 / 5  BLOBS