Hot Mess

Rating: 3/10 (21 January 2018)

Apparently I'm a moron, because I was supposed to see in "Mother!", Darren Aronofsky's latest exercise in hysteria, a Biblical parable taking us from Adam and Eve all the way through the apocalypse, with some commentary about climate change and Man's destruction of the Earth thrown in for good measure. I of course got the general Biblical vibe because it's pretty hard to miss, but I didn't take it quite so literally as a retelling of the Bible from A to Z, because how boring. Like what we really need is yet another retelling of a Biblical anything.
Though it shouldn't have surprised me, because this is the man who gave us a whackadoodle version of Noah's ark. I liked that one, because who doesn't want to think that the orcs from "Lord of the Rings" made an appearance in the Bible? But "Mother!" is a big pile of hooey, and a deeply unpleasant one to experience at that.
I wanted to like "Mother!", because it's been so divisive and it's way more fun to see brilliance where other people miss the point. But I was left feeling like this movie is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying......well, we all know how that line ends don't we?
The formidable talents of Jennifer Lawrence are wasted on a role that requires her to do nothing but run around getting increasingly annoyed that people are trashing her house. It's a repetitive performance in a repetitive movie that moves in fits and starts. Aronofsky runs out of ideas early on and decides that the way to add variety is to ratchet up the volume one notch at a time until everything crashes down in a flaming pile of carnage.
So I missed the Adam and Eve thing, but I did have some other interpretations of the film. One of the most straightforward examines the subservient role a woman plays in a marriage, especially when married to an artist. Another seems to explore the futility in our troubled times of trying to keep the world out of our perfect and idealized versions of home and family. But really the movie exhausted me too much to put effort into following any of these interpretations through to their conclusions.
Grade: D