Creation is a funny thing. When you’re in the act of making something that requires focus and energy, be it artwork or a spreadsheet, everything becomes heightened. Every sound, from a heaving old floorboard to the hum of a refrigerator to the chatter of people in rooms adjacent to you, is a source of agitation or a welcome distraction that frees you from the potential failure of your creative pursuit.
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| Photo credit: Mother!/IMDb |
If you are a particularly sensitive type, any diversion becomes a traumatic threat to your privacy, your personhood, your love, your life—all because you want to be left alone to keep flowing. The procrastinators, on the other hand, feel only relief when they do not have to focus on their responsibility, thus leaving behind those things and people they are supposed to care about most to escape.
Mother!, the latest psychological-horror film from writer-director Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan), centers on two people with opposing reactions to the distractions that keep them from creating. The otherwise-unnamed title character, played by Jennifer Lawrence, lives in a rickety and rustic home in the middle of nowhere with her poet husband, credited only as Him (Javier Bardem).
Mother is the solitary type, justifiably flustered and later filled with dread at any external circumstance that gets in her way as she attempts to renovate their home, which had been nearly burned to the ground in a fire an indeterminable amount of time before the events of the film. Him is on the other side of the creative spectrum, an outgoing sort who invites strangers into their home because they adore his poetry and stroke his ego. Conveniently, the time spent with these troublesome guests, played by an unsettling and needy Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer as a boozy busybody, allow Him to avoid working on his latest piece.
Aronofsky, by channeling the films of old masters like Ingmar Bergman and Carl Theodor Dreyer, takes this simple premise of an unappreciated wife dealing with unwanted and greedy guests and expands on it in ways both novel and legitimately bonkers until it reaches biblical proportions—fitting that this is his follow-up to 2014’s Noah. He takes on the myths we have told each other from the start of civilization and deconstructs them until all that is left is a tale about how the world will taunt good people with its callous lack of gratitude as it takes, takes, and takes everything those good people have to give, and then some.
Aronofsky’s regular collaborator, cinematographer Matthew Libatique, focuses the camera on Lawrence’s anxious face for the majority of the film’s runtime, just as Dreyer did with Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc. The frame wobbles around her as her world crumbles, as she realizes that her commitment to her husband may mean that she is trapped in an unequal partnership with no hope of improvement on her partner’s side. When she screams, the image on the screen shakes and blurs, threatening to blink into nothingness, to consign her to a fate of being used up and spit out by an indifferent person who is more concerned with ego than with the people in the world he claims to love. Him is an unflattering vision of God, desiring only adulation without wanting to give anything in return, which leads his most devoted followers, like Mother, to rattle as their hearts blacken and harden in the face of his inconceivable selfishness.
Mother!’s writer-director and cinematographer take the film a long way, but it would be lost if not for its true MVPs, the technical team. Sound designer Paula Fairfield and sound editor Coll Anderson team with art directors Isabelle Guay and Deborah Jensen and set designers Larry Dias and Martine Kazemirchuk to create something one feels rather than sees. The house Mother and Him occupy is broken but still standing. It echoes a traumatic past, with walls and floors that are pockmarked with scars, dust, and other forms of unknowable damage, which is hinted at by a sound mix that brings every crunch, smack, and pop to the forefront—the viewer is made intimately aware of where every increasingly distressing sound is coming from, which increases the suspense as they wait for that sound to manifest itself physically in front of Mother and the other characters. The house is not a home so much as the charred remains of something halfway forgotten but nevertheless impossible to shake. Blood-coated knots in wood floors are portals to traumatic memories long ago locked away and leaky pipes cake the ancient frame of the house in a moldy stickiness, a membrane trying like mad to protect Mother from understanding the true nature of who she is and where she lives.
But the thing about trauma is that it doesn’t go away. Much like temporarily abandoned creative projects, it will always be there, eating at you until you address it. Eventually you must finish things. That includes acknowledging that creation can be cruel. Creators can be crueler.
And there is only one way out of that abusive cycle of behavior.
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Writer: Darren Aronofsky
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer
Rating: 4/5 stars
Available in theaters now
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