A Polarizing Failure

Rating: 1/10 (16 September 2017)

Rarely has there been a motion picture as polarizing as "Mother!" Critics seem to be split almost down the middle in their consensus— about half seem euphoric over the picture, and the other half are furious. Of those critics who endorse "Mother!" many seem to be leading their defense of the picture with a vague suggestion that they like it because they're really, really smart, and the rest of us in the audience are dumb, dumb, dumb. And cousin, we all know that just ain't the way it is.
Of course, it doesn't matter one bit whether the critics love or hate "Mother!" Plenty of motion pictures open to enormous critical acclaim and still die a slow, painful death at the box office. The difference to a motion picture's success or failure is the audience, the people who pay to see it.
Most movie critics approach a picture with the advantage of not having to shell out their own do-re-mi for tickets. Audiences who have to actually reach for their wallets in order to see a movie might—and sometimes do—have a completely different reaction to the picture than the critics. And the audience's reaction to "Mother!" is historic in its emphasis.
CinemaScore, a Las Vegas-based polling service which surveys audience opinion of a motion picture on a scale from A to F based on exit interviews with theater patrons, reports an average audience score of F for "Mother!" In the history of CinemaScore, no other movie's rating has ever been that low—never, ever, ever.
In fairness to "Mother!" CinemaScore conducted their interviews with movie patrons while they were on their way out of a screening, undoubtedly still furious for having spent a substantial chunk of change on the experience. Had CinemaScore given audience members a day or two to calm down, the grade might have improved to something more like a D, or a D-minus.
"Mother!" after 2014's "Noah," is writer/director Darren Aronofsky's second whack at rewriting the Bible's Book of Genesis. Some viewers might remember "Noah" as the movie which revealed that giant three- armed monsters made of rocks did most of the heavy lifting as Noah built the Ark—a point later explained to have been subjective, but was suspected by many observers to have been included in the picture as a means of luring in the "Transformers" audience.
Starring Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem, "Mother!" nominally depicts the disruption of a married couple's tranquil life when unexpected guests arrive at their home. But actually, "Mother!" is an allegory—nothing is what it seems. The characters and situations are symbolic, and are designed to illustrate the director's interpretation of events described in the Old Testament. This notion is augmented by the names of the characters—Man, Woman, Him, Oldest Son, Younger Brotherand naturally, Mother.
One of the likely problems with the reception is that "Mother!" has been seemingly marketed as a horror picture, a sort of distaff, opposite version of 1968's "Rosemary's Baby." The misleading marketing was an error which "Mother!" star Jennifer Lawrence took to the television talk show circuit to correct, prior to the picture's release.
But instead of clarifying the issue, the infallibly candid Lawrence effectively further obscured the point by acknowledging that she didn't know precisely what "Mother!" is, except that it's brilliant and intense. During post-premiere interviews, Lawrence even actually seemed acknowledge that "Mother!" goes at least a little too far.
Which might be the understatement of the week. More than a reimagining of the Book of Genesis, "Mother!" sometimes more closely resembles a reimagining of Edward Albee, and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." And certainly there's no disguising the knowledge that during a week when only two new major motion pictures were released to theaters, "Mother!" came in third at the box office, and debuted to an audience which by all appearances plainly despised it.
Should you decide to attend "Mother!" be prepared to hate yourself later for having wasted a fistful of dollars, on a movie which probably shouldn't have been made at all.