Mother! is Ambitious but it Fails With Messy Execution and Pacing Problems

Rating: 4/10 (19 January 2018)

I'm one of the first people to jump on critics for excusing an incoherent and uninteresting plot because a movie is an art film. Excuses are used, buzzwords like "artistic" are thrown around and they make claims like you need to "meditate" to understand the "subtlety." I will give this movie credit for being visually impressive with the limited locations that they are working with. The setting they use for the house does have a good atmosphere and with some bottle films, you can't wait to leave. With Mother! you understand the metaphor (which I won't spoil) and I was fine spending the run time in this location. The use of CGI is limited but it isn't terrible and from a cinematography is really good. I fall on the negative side for this movie but I'm not afraid to give praise where credit is due.
The other bone I'm going to throw Mother! is that Jennifer Lawrence puts this movie on her back and carries it as far as she can. Her character is a little one note, but you can't help but sympathize with her. Her effort is commendable, there isn't a deeply written plot or character to work with, so her charisma has to do the work. Javier Bardem is a decent leading man and while I was annoyed with his character, it wasn't his fault. Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer are both solid and get the job done. Pfeiffer is deliberately grating but that's what she was given to work with. Kristen Wiig is an odd addition, but the movie had already gone downhill at that point.
Now that the positives are out of the way, I completely get why people were furious with this movie. I knew what the movie was about going in, so I knew what to look for and it helped me understand the plot better. If I hadn't known that, I would have despised Mother! Sure, some of the translation is effective but the movie wanders off on its own path to try and string things together. This doesn't work, much like Noah (which I was mostly mixed on as well) I feel like Aronofsky just gets to pick and choose what he wants and that doesn't lead to a cohesive story or an accurate portrayal of the text. Mother! stumbles repeatedly because of this and by the ending of the movie, I had run out of patience and wasn't willing to give it anymore participation points.
The other thing with this movie is that its extremely uneven with its pacing. The first half of this movie has so little action of consequence that it becomes boring and then the ending ventures so far into making the message the showcase, that the plot is left in the dust. The pace is frenetic in the end (usually that's a good thing) but its too late and just makes you realize that they didn't set things up for this payoff properly. Also if you got the overall metaphor for Mother!, that ending is as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face. It isn't well handled and although I agree with the message, you don't get extra praise for just having a good message if you don't explain it so the WHOLE audience can understand.
I like the ambition of the project and I respect Aronofsky and his team for swinging for the fences. The guy clearly has his own style and he's not content to just make the norm for the audience. These are good qualities but that doesn't make Mother! any less of a mess. There are kernels of good things in it but at the same time it feels like a vanity project that got away from the creative team. They clearly had big ideas and I can be sympathetic to them because the studio completely hoodwinked the audience in the marketing. This is an INDEPENDENT ART FILM, not a HORROR MOVIE and that's not on the people involved in making this movie, its on the studio. Even with that concession, the movie didn't work for me and by the end I was exhausted with it. I can't recommend this to anyone except professional critics, the rest of the audience is going to walk away from this like I did, confused and angry.