Fortress of solitude

Rating: 7/10 (22 November 2019)

The tire jack slipped. Jonathan Kent(Glenn Ford) should have been crushed by his pickup truck, but the fatal contact between man and metal never arrives. The truck is held in suspension by an inordinately strong boy who fell from the sky. Did this alien child need help loading his spacecraft into the man's truck? It's possible. The boy is strong, but short. If he loaded his spacecraft from the side by throwing it into the bed with outstretched arms pointed towards heaven, the weight of the thing could have broken the wheel axle. More than likely, Jonathan opened the door's latch and had his future adopted son ease the thing in from the back. Hopefully, they had a tarp to throw over the UFO. It's not called Smallville for nothing. People talk. Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky was once slated to direct "Man of Steel", which eventually got made with Zach Snyder at the helm. "mother!" is not just Bunuel-built, an homage to "The Exterminating Angel", the Spanish surrealist filmmaker's 1962 classic, but also "Superman", the 1978 original directed by Richard Lester. Soon after his father's heart attack, young Clark Kent(Jeff East) discovers the florescent green crystal in his spaceship, hidden in the barn. His alien intuition tells him to go north, apparently by foot. Into subzero Arctic air, he flings the green glowing object as far as he needs to. The crystal disappears in the melted snow. It's a building block that transforms earth's snowy landscape into architecture that's uniquely Krypton-esque. Clark is home-schooled, so to speak; a formal education supplied by Jor-el(Marlon Brando) via prerecorded messages leap years ahead of VHS technology. When Clark, in essence, graduates from the Fortress of Solitude, his school and home, and also, a chrysalis of sorts, he emerges as Superman(Christopher Reeve).
A poet, identified as Him(Javier Bardem) never wanted kids. He impregnates mother(Jennifer Lawrence), his wife, only after she emasculates the writer, asking him point blank, as to why their marriage is devoid of physical love? mother gives birth to a son; not in the hospital, but instead, the nursery she put together, because mother never leaves the house. Him, at first glance, isn't a cruel man; his wife seems free to come and go as she pleases, and yet the woman never gets past the front door, never sees what lies beyond the front lawn. Not even with a violent and bloody small-scale war in progress and formation of a cult devoted solely to the poet, mother stays with her unborn child inside the self-designated confines, telling strangers to get off her unbraced sink, and avoiding gunfire. How does "mother!" differ from "The Exterminating Angel"? Is she bourgeois like the dinner guests who can't get past the elegant house's salon? Yes and no. Although a bourgeois/proletariat binary exists in "mother!", Aronofsky provides a secondary binary that is given first priority. When Him demands that mother hand over the child, his son; only then does she start to distrust the poet, and perhaps, see the truth of their relationship she tries so hard to obfuscate. His followers outside the room, he explains, just want to lay eyes on their baby boy. When mother refuses, Him drags a chair in front of his small family, and waits for her to fall asleep. mother wakes up just in time to see her stolen baby being used as a human sacrifice, a ceremony that turns out to have literary ramifications. The poet could have put a stop to the murder, but he allows it, because he needs to allow it, for his own survival. Him's devoted readers hide the evidence by eating small portions of human flesh. Surely now, her husband will send everybody home. The wife's suspicion grows, and so does the audience, in regard to who, or what Him is, when he asks mother to forgive the cannibals. This, of course, would be the Christian thing to do: "Forgive thy enemy," but that's a cult of personality who ate their baby, not holy roller fundamentalists. The impossible request made by her husband pushes mother over the edge. And here is where Aronofsky riffs on "The Exterminating Angel", during that climactic scene when mother drops the lighter and sets everyone and everything on fire. Rita Ugalde(Patricia Moran), one of the dinner guests, in the Luis Bunuel film, about the proletariat, says: "I believe the common people, the lower class people, are less sensitive to pain. Haven't you ever seen a wounded bull? Not even a trace of pain." Why is Him the only person who survives the flames?
The writer can be the proletariat, but the act of writing is bourgeois.
The wife is not corporeal; she's a muse; a god, a literary god, who invents, not creates people. The first word out of mother's mouth is: "Baby." This baby grew up to be Him. The poet is merely a facilitator for mother's words. Him kills their baby because that child was his replacement. Him would not be able to write a single word without muses. Without mother, he would be, god forbid, a reader. mother is eternal, manifesting herself over and over again; a whole procession of mothers, who outlives her usefulness once Him finishes his latest work. Earlier in "mother!", an old married couple known as man(Ed Harris) and woman(Michelle Pfeiffer) drop a crystal object, shattering it to smithereens, in Him's study. The poet raises his voice, the only time in the whole film. The crystal, we learn in the denouement, comes not from some distant country, but somewhere closer to home, when Him, carrying mother, burnt almost beyond recognition, reaches into his wife's chest and steals her heart away. Paring down the organ's overdone meat, burnt flesh falling wayside, the poet gets what he wants; another crystal. He places the crystal in its exalted place of honor, a wire holder, as if it was a Faberge egg that contained a miniaturized scroll of Homer's last unfinished poem. The crystal has restoration powers. The house gets rebuilt. The house is alive. mother is the house; a crib for Him, her baby all grown up; a poet who tries to save humanity with words, alone in his fortress of solitude.
What kind of Superman would Darren Aronofsky have dreamt up? Nobody knows for sure, but consider this. Lois Lane(Margot Kidder), a mortal woman, strips Superman of his powers, in Richard Donner's "Superman II", whereas in "mother!", a muse, or rather, a superwoman, turns the poet into Him, an oracle. Maybe the mother who regenerates in the same bed where her predecessor originated from, will be smart enough to cut out the middleman and write her own story.