Mother!

I can rarely recall dreams but when I do it's usually because something terrible has lingered on to the point in which I am sure I can still feel the fear, sadness, or regret as though it happened in reality. My nightmares always seem to lure me in, just as I'm beginning to call their bluff and wake up, something very close and familiar happens just in time to drag me deeper until I get so fully immersed that even the most bizarre and impossible things become real and it's much harder to shut it down and wake up. That's the first thing that struck me about Mother!, a film that can/will surely tempt the majority of its viewers to tether its happenings and characters to themes, allegories, riddles, and metaphors. I suppose that'll have to mostly wait until a second viewing, something that I very much look forward to. For me, it was a nightmare.

I'll admit forthright that their were certainly forces outside of the film itself that made me extra aware of its soundscape; among the most impressive I have heard in a very long time. Comparisons to Polanski's Rosemary's Baby are rampant (as well as the rest of the apartment trilogy), but today I thought about that oft told anecdote about Polanski's instructions to William A. Fraker to deliberately point the camera just far enough to the side of a certain door frame as to obscure our vision into the room beyond, causing audiences to lean to the right in hopes to see what trouble Ruth Gordon was stirring up. Here I heard voices, just faint enough that I would catch cryptic premonitions (or so I thought) of the wicked things about to blow our way. You want to hear what these guests are saying because you are sharing a consciousness with the titular heroine. Her trepidation to host these increasingly awful barnacles is often tempered by her husband's pride and need to be validated by an audience. Soon her house, that has been so carefully and lovingly restored, is taken over and pillaged by a swarm of zealous locusts. The only way to stop a swarm of locusts is to burn them and everything they inhabit.

The locusts are drawn by the Bluebeard poet, pretentious and selfish, always tending to his legacy and never to his wife. He is drawn back into the peril and madness if only to absorb more of the choruses of praise and adoration that fuel his waning creativity. He sacrifices her and more to the altar of vanity. The guest's offenses escalate, little things begin to rot the house's foundation and mother's withering mind until the entire structure (which seems to grow several floors taller as the madness escalates) erupts into a full blown battle zone, like a nightly stroll through our current mess. The pandemonium is brilliantly orchestrated, the violence often abrupt, ridiculous, and always unsettling. I've been drawn to an unguarded an unhinged approach to art, the kind that leaves oneself bare and vulnerable to all sorts of shame to be raked over the coals. One of Mother's many virtues is its willingness to be mocked and hated in its desperate desire to burst out of its "poet's" pen.

Darren Aronofsky's technique here is risky, but for the first time in his career I found him free to move beyond the strictures of a dominant central theme vortex or a need to tidy up and tie things together. This is an abnormally talented director at his peak, throwing his innards at the page and screen, seemingly not giving a shit if any of it sticks. I can't think of another mainstream release in recent years that has toyed so cruelly with its unsuspecting audience. Paramount deserves credit for not burying it. It's an angry little film that touches upon God's betrayal of earth's beloved matriarch, our collective blind fanatical love and obsession with him, our very poor stewardship, the perils of love, the perils of writer's block, the perils of parenthood, etc. I haven't even begun to unlock it. This is not to say that I found it all successful, but I'll take this brand of brash virtuosity over just about everything else I've seen this year. It seems obligatory to confess that I don't belong to the Aronofsky cult, at least I didn't before.