Mother!: A Review, Rant, and Half-Assed Re-Telling

WARNING 1: This is not a formal review. Expect roughness as I process my thoughts and spend way too long on certain topics. Unless I get paid to write it, my reviews are always going to be half formal, half word-vomit from my strange and fractured and slightly pretentious little brain.

WARNING 2: This will be full of spoilers. There is no possible way for me to share my thoughts on this film without huge spoilers.

I mean, come on, guys....THE THEME IS
RIGHT. THERE.

Gun to my head, Darren Aronofsky is my favourite director/screenwriter.

Requiem for a Dream is, to this day, one of the most truly haunting films I’ve ever seen. The Fountain is one of my favourite films of all time. Black Swan, The Wrestler, The Fighter, Pi—this man is the master of dark, semi-surreal films that grapple with some of our darkest fears; addiction, imperfection, aging past our prime, our own mortality. Aronofsky refuses to soften the blow of these themes, choosing instead to lay them bare in all their naked brutality. Due to this, and his penchant for messing with reality and leaving his audience members on very shaky existential ground, Aronofsky and his films get a lot of backlash. It happened with Requiem, it happened with Black Swan, it tragically happened with The Fountain, and, at least in my movie theatre last night, it’s happening with his newest film.

Mother! is, on its surface, the story of a young woman and her older poet husband in a secluded house. As the poet struggles with writer’s block, the young woman single-handedly restores their home, which had been the poet’s in an earlier life, before the young woman came into the picture, and had burned down. Soon, however, a strange man enters their home, soon followed by his wife, and the young woman’s life, and meticulously-cared-for home, begins to crumble.

Okay, that’s about as formal as I can be for this review. It’s time to dive in and get messy.

I figured out that this film was a re-telling of the story of Christianity when the sons of the invading couple showed up, but there were many hints before that. If audience members didn’t get the metaphor by 30 minutes in, they weren’t going to get it at all. I truly don’t understand how it could possibly be missed.

The poet is God, a gentle but intensely selfish creator obsessed with the adoration of his creations. The young woman is Mother Earth (hence the title.) She adores the poet so much that she alone restores every inch of his home; from the skylights to the floors to the plumbing to the painting. At the beginning of the film, she is not quite finished, but the house is livable and beautiful. It is, in fact, living; Mother is connected to the home because it is the Earth itself. She brushes her fingers against the walls, listens, and can see/feel the heart of the home, beating behind the walls. When tensions occur between her and the poet, she feels it in her heart (brilliantly manifested as a panic-attack-like occurrence) and sees flashes of the home as the ashes from which it had come. The heart of the home, too, grows ashy and slows as tensions rise and the home, the Earth, is in peril.

The stranger who shows up at their door, played by Ed Harris, is Adam. The poet is infatuated with him immediately; fascinated by his stories, his pain, and Adam’s total adoration of the poet himself (represented as “fandom” within the metaphor.) Mother, on the other hand, is intensely disturbed by Adam’s sudden presence. He is rude, looking at Mother up and down in a semi-lecherous way, smoking in the house and disregarding her protests. To Mother’s horror, the poet welcomes the stranger into the house, telling him to stay as long as he wants. He seems totally ignorant of the strange sense of entitlement that Adam immediately has of the house and of Mother. His smoking and intense gazes are the manifestations of his entitlement; man’s entitlement to the Earth that doesn’t belong to them, and a foreshadowing of the damage to come with Adam’s progeny.

We catch a glimpse of the poet touching a wound on Adam—a gash on his side, in his rib area. Only after that does Eve, played by Michelle Pfieffer, come to the house as the wife that Adam never mentioned. The poet welcomes her in as quickly as he welcomed Adam. He watches lovingly as she and Adam kiss while Mother looks away, mildly disgusted. Soon Adam and the poet leave the house entirely, and Mother is alone with Eve. Eve is even ruder than Adam; helping herself to the kitchen, making boozy lemonade and leaving the mess behind. She badgers Mother about her sexual relationship with the poet and flashes her racy underwear. She rips open a wound of Mother’s; that the poet has been too distracted to have sex with her, despite their desire to have children. Eve also goes into the poet’s office despite Mother explicitly stating that the poet doesn’t like anyone in there without him. The office is Eden, and Eve's fixation on sex and intimacy is indicative of modern Christianity's interpretation of the fall of Man.

The poet is completely oblivious to Adam and Eve’s rudeness and entitlement, and completely oblivious to the extra work that Mother has to do to accommodate their guests. He doesn’t consult her before inviting them to stay as long as they please, doesn’t thank her for cooking for them or cleaning up their constant messes. Though Mother is repulsed, the poet seems obsessed with their guests—until they commit the ultimate sin.

While Mother and the poet are in an intimate conversation, they hear a shattering sound come from upstairs. Adam and Eve are in the poet’s office, without permission, and they have shattered his prized possession; a chunk of glass with threaded embers within; a souvenir the poet says he had fished from the rubble when the home had first burned down. Only then do we see the poet angry. He yells, and his voice booms like thunder. He exiles his guests from his office and the two retreat to their room. Mother, enraged, follows them to finally throw them out of their home—and catches them having sex. Meanwhile, rather than agreeing to throw them out, the poet instead boards up the door to his office so his guests can never get in again. The fall of man and his exile from Eden has come to pass.

Before anyone can catch their breath, one of Adam and Eve’s two sons comes into the home, looking for his father. His brother, fiery and enraged about his father’s will, soon follows. The brothers fight, damaging the home along the way, and Mother is helpless to stop it. The poet seems to calm the violent brother, but alas, it is short-lived. The brothers fight again and one is stabbed in the neck with a door handle in the struggle. The violent brother flees in the commotion. Mother is the horrified witness to it all. The brothers are, obviously, Cain and Abel.

The poet, Adam, and Eve scoop up Abel and rush him off to the hospital, leaving Mother alone in the house, though she begs the poet not to leave her. She locks the doors and cleans up the blood, but there is a mysterious spot on the floor; a spot that feels soft like flesh and still bleeds (And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand.) Hours later, she hears a crash and discovers a door broken open—with a bloody hand print on it. She discovers Cain in the house. His forehead is wounded with a distinct mark from his struggle with Abel. “You understand. I see it.” He says. Then he nonchalantly picks up his wallet from the floor and leaves. The poet returns shortly after, exhausted. Abel died in his arms in the hospital. Mother is terrified by the encounter with Cain and the entire horrifying experience, but Adam and Eve are gone from the home, and as she crawls into bed beside the slumbering poet, she feels the worst is over.

The next morning, however, Adam and Eve are back. The poet had invited them, as well as their friends and family, to mourn in his home. “They have nowhere to go,” he says when Mother protests. The house is flooded with people, all as rude and entitled as Adam and Eve. They take food, they sit on a sink that Mother has not yet braced despite her constant protest. A man hits on Mother and refuses to take no for an answer. After her fourth or fifth protest, he calls her a c*** and storms off. Guests sit on the sink yet again, bouncing on it to prove that it’s “fine” to sit on. It bursts from the wall, spraying everyone with water. Mother finally screams for everyone to get out. The poet finally complies, ushering them out the door. The Flood has washed humanity from the Earth.

The poet and Mother finally have sex, she gets pregnant, and the next nine months are spent in blissful solitude, preparing for their baby and restoring their beautiful home. The poet, inspired by the guests and Mother's pregnancy, writes frantically, and what he creates is a masterpiece.

I’ll stop the play-by-play there, but the entire story unfolds: The Bible, the church, the birth and absolutely horrifying death of Jesus, the completely non-metaphorical portrayal of taking sacrament (be still, my turning stomach.) The film grows increasingly less subtle as it goes on, until finally, during Mother’s labour, Aronofsky dispenses with metaphor entirely and bombards us with imagery of the most horrifying aspects of human nature. The house is overcrowded, callously raided and ripped apart by literal war. It isn’t until the death of Jesus that Mother finally, finally fights back.

By the film’s third act, I truly have no idea how anyone could possibly have missed the metaphor. I was completely flabbergasted when I heard the mutterings of my fellow audience members when the credits finally rolled:

“That’s two hours we’ll never get back.”

“What a waste of a ticket.”

“What the hell was even happening?”

“That movie was horrible.”

“I didn’t get it at all.”

…what? I’d never felt more alone in a movie theatre in my life. If my husband hadn’t also totally understood the story, I would have thought I had gone insane. I am still completely baffled as to how anyone could have possibly missed the story this film was telling.

I don’t mention this to harp on it, nor to pretend that I’m a creative genius with some deep, cinematic insight. I’m definitely not. This film was not subtle. Aronofsky spends the entire third act bludgeoning the audience to death with the story’s underlying meaning. I mean, there are altars to the poet where an ovbious priest is blessing people Ash Wednesday-style with ink and saying, “His words are Your words” for Chrissakes.

Aronofsky has created films that are abstract, obscure, and require multiple viewings to grasp. He has made films whose ultimate meanings are still debated to this day. Mother! is not one of those films. Mother! is cut from the cloth of Black Swan and much of Aronofsky’s later works. The story’s ultimate meaning may begin in subtle or obscure ways, but by the end of it, all nuance is thrown to the wind.

Ever since The Fountain, Aronofsky hasn’t trusted his audience to understand subtlety or metaphor. And I don’t blame him. The Fountain was his passion project. It took him years to develop and it was obvious that he poured every ounce of his heart and his talent into it. When it was released, critics tore it apart. Pretentious. Muddled. Unfocused. Bizarre for the sake of being bizarre.

I’m not usually one to accuse anyone who didn’t like a more symbolic or surreal film of disliking it because they “don’t get it.” But in this case…yeah, critics just didn’t get it. The Fountain has its issues, mostly on the budget front, but all in all, it’s a masterpiece, and yes, I will fight you on that. Those of us who actually enjoy the film still debate its meaning to this day (there are two prevailing theories, but I won’t get into them here…you’re welcome.) As the years have passed and people have actually had time to process its themes, many have changed their tune about this film. For Aronofsky’s work, however, the damage had been done. It’s obvious from the films that followed The Fountain that he was done trusting his audience. He never compromised his unflinching artistic style, but now every plot of every film is meticulously spoon-fed to us. By the end of Black Swan, there is zero doubt that Natalie Portman’s character has hallucinated everything. There is no room for interpretation, no obscurity. We don’t deserve that from Aronofsky anymore. If that sounds bitter, it is.* The shift in Aronofsky’s work feels a bit bitter, and Mother! is no exception.

Mother! is the story of creation from Mother Earth’s perspective. In love with a God who cares more about his creations than he could possibly care about her, she is doomed even before mankind invades. The poet leaves Mother to restore their home, never asks he consent before welcoming his rude guests or helps her with accommodating them. Mankind can do no wrong to him. He continually makes excuses for their behaviour, even the extreme stuff, like literally ransacking the house: “It’s just stuff, it can be replaced.” He continually chooses them over Mother, basking in their adoration while they rip crown molding from the walls, steal souvenirs, and gorge themselves on the special dinner Mother had made just for the two of them. When their infant is born—while they are barricaded in his office, away from the chaos in the house—Mother has lost all of her trust in him, and it is clear why. Despite turning their house into a literal war zone at that point, the poet will not ask his guests to leave. He has chosen them over her, over their child. And so Mother refuses to let him hold their new son. Rather than understanding, choosing his family over the adoration of others, and turning his guests away…he pulls up a chair and stares coldly at Mother until she falls asleep with exhaustion. The minute her defenses are down, he hands their only son to the masses so they can ‘adore’ him, and…well, you’ve read the Bible. Even after the slaughter and cannibalism of their child, the poet will not forsake his worshippers. “Look how sorry they are!” he says.

Cornered, devastated, and alone, Mother finally fights back. She cuts down people lingering nearby as they consume the flesh of the infant they murdered, her infant, and she is attacked; spit on, beaten, and cursed. The poet tries to stop it, but he will not hurt his beloved guests, will not tame them.

This film does not make you feel good. It seizes the Christian story of mankind’s blessed bond with God and twists it into a story of neglect, abuse, and tragedy. God is selfish, addicted to the adoration of the masses, so in love with his own creations that he will let them destroy everything he built, let them destroy each other, let them destroy his own baby, and will not turn them away. God’s forgiveness becomes God’s cruelty when told through the eyes of the Earth. Mankind is entitled, spoiled, selfish, repulsive, violent, and unhinged. They worship God but do not respect the Earth on which they live. They rip resources from the Earth, neglect it, change its landscape (shown in the film by painting walls and rearranging furniture however they please) without consent, respect, or even forethought, because God told them “this is for all of us.” Man is so depraved that they murder the infant of the God they allegedly worship and show their remorse by worshipping it posthumously and consuming its flesh. And when the Earth, neglected, stripped, and grief-stricken, dares to fight back, she is met with more violence. Man shows no understanding of how they have wronged her, no understanding of her pain.

This is a film about the hypocrisy and insatiability of God. His cruelty is through his neglect, his narcissism, and his selfishness. (He is, however, never portrayed as openly antagonistic, which is a testament to both the Javier Bardem's performance and the writing.)  When the metaphor has totally fallen apart at the end, and the burnt and blackened Mother says, “I have nothing left to give,” God still asks more of her: Her heart, her love, the core of her life, so he can start this cycle all over again. And despite his constant choosing of his need to create and his need for adoration over her well-being, the Earth gives the very last thing she can to him—and she crumbles to ash.

More importantly, however, this is a film about mankind’s damage to the planet on which we live, our carelessness. It is about the Earth’s natural response to our violent occupation: Climate change. It is a relevant story told through the lens of our most popular mythology.

There is so much more I can say about this film; so many more references to discuss and positions from which to interpret (the tight, claustrophobic shots for Mother and the cold, distant shots for the poet, the use of water, the choice of a Grecian gown when the poet refers to Mother as "my goddess" and the possible environmental implications of Christianity's rejection of Earth worship, the muddling of race and culture to show a cohesive cruelty of man........dare I look at the film from a feminist perspective...?!) but this post is long and unfocused enough.

In short: I simultaneously loved it and was cruelly disappointed by it. I loved it as a twisted reinterpretation of a much-beloved story and I loved it for its unflinching look at our impact on the planet on which we live. For an Aronofsky film, though, it felt rushed, and it felt weak. As a general film, I give it a B+. As an Aronofsky film, it's a solid D. But I did love it.

By the time Mother sets fire to the house, I was in tears and cheering for her. Fuck him. Fuck them. Fuck them all. They deserve this.

We deserve this.

*I wholeheartedly admit that this is my own interpretation of Aronofsky's shift in style and that it could be totally wrong…but the shift in style did happen…just saying.