Interesting, but heavy handed

Rating: 5/10 (15 September 2017)

Mother! is a thematically and symbolically heavy movie. A certain kind of film student might love it for the way it explores a number of key themes, and its use of symbolism. The range of themes and anxieties here include:

Oppressive husbands/families. - Artists who use consume their partners or muses. - Societal expectations re motherhood, childbearing, and domesticity. - The pressure to build a home, stay in it, and produce babies -all for others. - Fear of domestic failure – fear of building a broken home, and fear of miscarriage.

Mother! is also about the cyclic trauma of motherhood – or at least of a kind of motherhood, where the self is given up for others. It is unclear who is really at fault here – is it husbands, society, families, or all of these who are to blame for sapping the life force from the young mother. All are seemingly targeted, as they close in on JL with increasing acts of oppression and degradation.
These are interesting themes, and some of the symbolism here is also interesting. The problem with Mother! is that it pushes these themes and symbols with a heavy, repetitive hand.
For me the central theme, or at least the most interesting, was the idea of the horror of the domestic space, and the idea of house as monster.
'Mother' (Jennifer Lawrence) is trying to build a nice home. Throughout the film, though, the house represents different negative forces – constraint, isolation, a traumatic past, and the inward- pushing pressures of society. There is a sense that if only Mother could escape the house, or destroy the house, she would be free from her turmoil. The walls are large, dark and oppressive. They are coated in paints of dissonant greys. When Mother leans too close to them, the manifestation of her anxiety and fear – her straining, burning heart – appears. Whether the walls are functioning here as a reminder of a past trauma, or whether it is the walls themselves that are the present trauma (i.e. domestic encasement), the house is definitely a source of horror. She drinks a colourful concoction to try to manage her heartburn, but it is futile, as her problems run deeper. Throughout Mother!, there are many monstrous figures (including her husband, played by Harvier Bardem) but the house is the central monster.
These are interesting and scary ideas. At times they worked well, but ultimately they were just pushed a little too hard, and for too long.
There are times when Mother! is more subtle and successful. Unfortunately these are pretty rare, and only really in the opening thirty minutes. Still, they're worth praising. Jennifer Lawrence's performance is effective in its ineffectualness. Her voice is not just soft – it is weak, and embedded with an emotional vulnerability that reminds of the feeling of helplessness experienced in a nightmare. The way her verbal attempts to assert herself in the home ("I'll take these glasses", "I'll paint this wall", and ultimately, "I'll have this baby") are denied are subtle and effective. Bardem's character "politely" rejects and supersedes her will – in a stronger, deeper voice: "No I'll take those glasses", "We aren't having children," etc. It is appropriate that the dismissal of Mother's will is casual, and under the veil of social politeness. Bardem's offences here are slight, and they are surface-social, but for Mother they are consistent acts of dismissal and oppression. The fact that they come in the form of social or domestic duties reinforces that she is being suffocated not be real monsters or violence, but by her small, domestic life. The larger story of the first act, that Mother has decided to rebuild someone else's home as (or instead of) her own, is also an interesting story of subservience and forfeit in an unbalanced relationship. These elements work because they are grounded in a real story, and the symbolic elements work subtly to support that story.
Where things go wrong is in act two and three, when these ideas are hammered home too hard. What was subtle and interesting becomes prominent and heavy-handed. Symbolism is no longer a supporting player, but appears front and center to these themes home. Not new themes – the same themes we'd already been given in a more effective form. We already feel that the home she is building is somehow off, and a representation of her encasement. We are then given scenes of the walls crumbing down on her, her heart shriveling up under this pressure, images of a house burning to ash, and old wounds re- opening and bleeding into the home. These images feel like they're crafted by a first-year Cinema Studies student, who has just read "Psychoanalysis and Cinema!" and written their first script. Where Lawrence's meek voice and casual dismissal was so effective in act one, in act two she is outright ignored. The function of this seems to be only to make the point already made (she is being oppressed by the social forces pressing in on her), but in a more obvious way, and with a less relevant perpetrator. In act one it was her husband ignoring her requests in an eerily familiar, realistic way. In acts two and three it is strangers intruding uninvited into rooms, or jumping on unbraced sinks despite Mother's instructions. These moments rings less true, and feel just like a redundant, less competent depiction of the same idea.
Mother! explores important real-world issues, but comparisons with Aronofsky's earlier films, and with other recent explorations of similar topics, reveals the problems with his method here. The issues are real, but the movie devolves into frustrating, repetitive symbolism.