MOTHER! (US - 2017) Written and directed by Darren Aronofsky. Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer, Domhnall Gleeson, Brian Gleeson, Kristen Wiig, Stephen McHattie, Emily Hampshire, Laurence Leboeuf. (R, 121 mins) To say MOTHER! isn't for everyone is the understatement of the year. The latest film from director Darren Aronofsky (REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, THE WRESTLER, BLACK SWAN), MOTHER! might be his crowning achievement thus far. A nightmare that makes the last half-hour of REQUIEM FOR A DREAM look restrained, MOTHER! is so intricately constructed that there's too much to unpack and analyze on just one viewing. Certainly it's a film that's going to provoke debate and discussion, but most importantly, polarizing reaction. The phrase "love it or hate it" gets thrown about a bit too freely sometimes, but that's precisely the response MOTHER! is going to get. Much has been made of the horrific events in the film and they're there, but mileage may vary: genre fans who have some background in extreme horror and/or transgressive art cinema won't be as shocked as casual moviegoers who are fans of THE HUNGER GAMES and SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK and think they're going to see the latest Jennifer Lawrence vehicle. MOTHER! is intense, grueling, incredibly uncomfortable, and frequently off-the-charts cringe-worthy. But it's also brilliantly acted, richly textured with metaphorical interpretations and symbolism, and one of the best and most audacious films of 2017. In an era of franchises, branding, and endless reboots and remakes, major studios and A-list stars just don't make risky and provocative movies like this anymore. And they've never made one like MOTHER!
A plot synopsis is pointless, but for what it's worth: Lawrence (as "Mother") and Javier Bardem (as "Him") are a married couple who live in a large, isolated old house in the country, in the middle of a vast field with no visible roads leading to it. He's a famous author suffering from particularly difficult bout of writer's block. She's a homemaker currently deeply involved in renovating the more dilapidated parts of the house. One night, there's a knock at the door and it's Ed Harris (as "Man"), a professor who mistakes the house for a bed & breakfast. Bardem invites Harris to stay the night, even though he presumptuously lights up a cigarette in the house and seems offended when Lawrence asks him to put it out. Harris gets very ill and spends the night coughing and vomiting but in the morning, is fine and acts like nothing happened. That's when Michelle Pfeiffer (as "Woman") shows up. She's Harris wife, and is even ruder houseguest, dismissing Lawrence's life choices, going through her laundry and making derisive comments about her frumpy underwear, and questioning why she's married to such an older man. Pfeiffer makes a mess in the kitchen, leaves faucets running, and goes into Bardem's study after being told multiple times by Lawrence that he doesn't want people in there without him. When she and Harris go into Bardem's study and accidentally shatter a cherished crystallized glass piece that's of utmost important to him, they're offended about being asked to leave ("We said we were sorry!") and Lawrence walks in on them having sex in the next room five minutes later. Then their adult sons Domnhall Gleeson (as "Older Son") and Brian Gleeson (as "Younger Brother") show up, arguing about what's in Harris' will. A brotherly brawl results in the death of one of the siblings and Bardem agrees to host a post-funeral dinner gathering without telling Lawrence. More and more guests arrive without notice and from out of nowhere, help themselves to all areas of the house, try to fuck in Lawrence's and Bardem's bed, damage the kitchen sink and tear the plumbing out of the wall, and eventually, the entire house starts to resemble the stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers' A NIGHT AT THE OPERA. Then things just go off the rails and get really bizarre.
MOTHER! is like going through a two-hour anxiety attack. Upon a cursory glance of the trailer and the promotional material, the obvious influence is ROSEMARY'S BABY, but Aronofsky is actually paying homage to Polanski's unofficial "Apartment Trilogy"of REPULSION (1965), ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968), and THE TENANT (1976). The first hour of the film has that same slow-burning intensity, escalating discomfort, and frequently dark and absurdist humor of those three Polanski films, centering on people beset by psychological demons and unwanted interlopers who keep aggressively manipulating them into submission (there's also a nod to a famous shot in Dario Argento's TENEBRAE). The second half--and the less you know about it the better--loses Harris and Pfeiffer (do they ultimately have anything to do with anything?) but goes full Luis Bunuel Apocalypse, an overwhelming and delirious nightmare of EXTERMINATING ANGEL proportions put through a Lars von Trier filter that can be interpreted as everything from a Biblical allegory and a rebuking of religious extremism to a metaphor for the creative process and a scathing auto-critique of the narcissism and self-absorption of pretentious artists. Lawrence's "Mother" is constantly denigrated and marginalized, whether it's by her husband who revels in the adoration of the fans who show up at the house while forgetting all the support she's given him when no one else was around (how much of himself is Aronofsky putting on display here?), or by the invasive throng of houseguests who refuse to leave and look at her as an intruder on their time with "The Poet" as they hang on his every word and treat him like a god. But then there's other things--heartbeats in the wall, a strange yellow powder that Lawrence mixes with water, frogs in the basement, a freshly built basement wall that hides a secret room, and a spot on a hardwood floor that becomes a festering wound that won't stop bleeding no matter what lengths Lawrence--who's never been better than she is here--will go to cover it up. And there's a toilet clogged by what looks like some kind of human organ. It's been years since a major Hollywood studio bankrolled something this unapologetically fucked-up (thanks for your service, A CURE FOR WELLNESS, but you're no longer the weirdest wide-release movie of 2017). Exhausting, exhilarating, challenging, thought-provoking, beyond audacious, and fearless about going into some extremely dark places, MOTHER! is a masterpiece. Regardless of your response to it, there's no denying that there's never been anything like it.
AFTERMATH (US/UK - 2017) Directed by Elliott Lester. Written by Javier Gullon. Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Scoot McNairy, Maggie Grace, Martin Donovan, Judah Nelson, Kevin Zegers, Larry Sullivan, Glenn Morshower, Hannah Ware, Jason McCune, Mo McRae, Mariana Klaveno, Christopher Darga, Lewis James Pullman. (R, 93 mins) Though he's now in the William Shatner self-deprecation phase of his career, Jean-Claude Van Damme very quietly established himself as a capable actor in a series of above-average and under-the-radar straight-to-DVD action movies throughout the '00s. In a similarly stealth fashion, in addition to action fare like the EXPENDABLES movies, THE LAST STAND, and ESCAPE PLAN, a post-Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger has made attempts to turn into a serious dramatic actor in a pair of low-profile departures when no one was looking. First was 2015's MAGGIE, a straight-faced zombie apocalypse saga where Arnold played a loving father determined to hold on to the shred of humanity in his teenage daughter after she's turned into one of the walking dead. And now, the grim drama AFTERMATH gives the nearly-70-year-old former action hero a chance to further stretch outside his comfort zone. Written by Javier Gullon (ENEMY) and counting Darren Aronofsky (BLACK SWAN) among its 27 credited producers, AFTERMATH is inspired by the story of Vitaly Kaloyev, a Russian man whose wife and two children were killed when two planes collided over Germany in the summer of 2002. He blamed supervising air traffic controller Peter Nielsen, who retired from his job and moved away but two years later, Kaloyev, still consumed by grief and rage, tracked him down to a small town in Switzerland, showed up at his front door, and stabbed him to death in front of his family.
AFTERMATH relocates the story to Cincinnati, OH (after all, this is also a Grindstone Entertainment and Emmett/Furla production), where Russian-born Roman Melnyk (Schwarzenegger) is a naturalized American citizen who has settled into a honest, hard-working, blue collar life as a construction site manager. Upon arriving at the airport to pick up his wife and pregnant adult daughter, who are returning home from an extended visit to see family in their native Kiev, Roman is ushered into an office where an airport staffer informs him that the plane carrying his wife and daughter crashed. Director Elliott Lester (the Jason Statham actioner BLITZ) cuts from Roman to Jacob Bonanos (Scoot McNairy), the air traffic controller on the graveyard shift who's left alone in the control tower when the required second controller decides to take a break, leaving Jacob to deal with a malfunctioning phone that requires him to remove his headset, causing him to notice too late that two passenger jets are headed toward one another (Lester very effectively depicts the crash not with special effects and destruction, but by both planes simply vanishing from Jacob's screen). Jacob is ushered into a conference room where he explains what happened and is assured that no one is blaming him, but he's so overcome by guilt in the days and weeks after that his wife Christina (Maggie Grace) decides it's best for her and their young son Samuel (Judah Nelson) to be away from him for a while, especially when vandals spray-paint "Killer" and "Murderer" over the front of their house. Meanwhile, Roman is finding it difficult to accept what's happened, especially when no one offers an apology and he's only met with smirking derision by the airline's slick, arrogant lawyer (Kevin Zegers), who repeatedly talks over him and tosses a $160,000 settlement contract across a table to him, refusing to even look at a photo of Roman's wife and daughter. Put on administrative leave and with his personal life falling to pieces, Jacob loses the support of his company-man boss (a perfectly-cast Martin Donovan), who encourages him to take a severance package, change his name, relocate to another city and start his life over. A year goes by, during which time Jacob has moved away and changed his name, while Roman is contacted by an ethically-challenged reporter (Hannah Ware) who's written a book about the fatal mid-air collision and alerts him to Jacob's whereabouts.
AFTERMATH sometimes feels like it's stacking the deck, with Zegers' attorney being such an unconscionable prick that you'll wish old-school Schwarzenegger would pummel the shit out of him. And it puts both Roman and Jacob through the usual tropes of grief, with Roman getting drunk and standing atop an under-construction building and contemplating jumping, while Jacob downs some pills before gathering his senses, purging them about 30 seconds later. One scene that seems almost too ludicrous and thoroughly unbelievable actually happened: when Roman manages to sneak into the crash site as a volunteer, he happens to see his daughter's pearl necklace on a branch and nearby, finds her body dangling high up in a tree that broke her fall from the sky. That actually happened when Kaloyev infiltrated a team of volunteers at the German crash site. Lionsgate isn't doing much with AFTERMATH, banishing it to VOD and a small handful of theaters. The trailer sells it as a sort-of formulaic Schwarzenegger revenge thriller, but it's a somber and low-key meditation on grief felt by two men who have lost everything in an incredible tragedy. It's inevitable that the focus will be on Schwarzenegger doing straight drama in what could be called his COP LAND, but doing so would detract from the outstanding performance by McNairy, who's become one of the most reliable character actors in movies today (KILLING THEM SOFTLY, ARGO, 12 YEARS A SLAVE). Jacob's negligence on duty was a legitimate mistake (though the trailer is edited as such that it looks like he's thoughtlessly getting coffee instead of doing his job), and you feel his anguish, especially in a difficult scene where he breaks down after being told 271 people are dead. Gullon's script puts Roman and Jacob through too a few too many cliched plot turns (their drinking, Jacob's fights with his wife, a paranoid Jacob stocking up on guns, Roman getting kicked out of the cemetery, where he spends his nights sleeping by his wife and daughter's graves), but by sticking to the events of its inspiration, it doesn't absolve anyone. This is especially true of Roman, who's slow-boiling anger goes way beyond wanting a sincere apology when he decides to take a concealed knife with him when he knocks on Jacob's door, proof positive he's gone from grief to madness and not in a cathartic, crowd-pleasing way. As good as Schwarzenegger was in MAGGIE, he didn't sound much like a midwestern farmer, and it helps that his performance here marks one of the few times in his career that his character has an excuse for that distinctive accent. That said, I'm not sure if there's an excuse for why, in 2017, we're still seeing Arnold's ass in a scene where Roman showers after work.
NOAH (US - 2014) Directed by Darren Aronofsky. Written by Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel. Cast: Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Emma Watson, Logan Lerman, Douglas Booth, Leo McHugh Carroll, Marton Csokas, Madison Davenport, voices of Nick Nolte, Frank Langella, Kevin Durand, Mark Margolis. (PG-13, 138 mins)
Biblical purists aren't going to go for Darren Aronofsky's revisionist take on Noah's Ark, which is faithful to the point of including Noah and an ark. At times seeming like J.R.R. Tolkien's The Bible, Aronofsky's NOAH succeeds as epic cinema and as part of the bigger picture of the filmmaker's work as a whole. One of Aronofsky's recurrent themes, from PI (1998), REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000), THE FOUNTAIN (2006), THE WRESTLER (2008) all the way to BLACK SWAN (2010), is the obsessive, frequently maniacal, and all-consuming nature of their protagonists. In that respect, Russell Crowe's Noah is cut from the same cloth as Ellen Burstyn's Sara Goldfarb and her diet pills in REQUIEM, Mickey Rourke's Randy "The Ram" Robinson in THE WRESTLER or Natalie Portman's Nina Sayers in BLACK SWAN. To some degree, Aronofsky's characters are perpetually in a head-on descent into self-destructive madness.
Such is the case with Noah, a descendant of Adam & Eve's third son Seth. Though "God" is never invoked, "The Creator" supplies Noah with a vision of the world's flooded end as punishment for man's sins. Noah is entrusted to build an ark, to which The Creator will direct all of the world's animals to begin life anew after its watery destruction. Noah spends ten years building the massive ark with his wife Naameh (Jennifer Connelly), their sons Shem (Douglas Booth), Ham (Logan Lerman), and Japheth (Leo McHugh Carroll), and adopted daughter and Shem's love interest Ila (Emma Watson), left barren from injuries sustained in a massacre of her people and rescued by Noah and Naameh years earlier. He also gets assistance from a group of fallen angels known as The Watchers, stone giants who resemble ancient Transformers with the voices of Nick Nolte and Frank Langella. As the animals make their way to the under-construction ark (and a steam potion puts them in a state of hibernation), warrior-king and Cain descendant Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone) decides to kill distant relative Noah and orders his army to take control of the ark in an attempt to survive The Creator's extermination of mankind.
Winstone!
But the massive flood is just the beginning, as middle child Ham is resentful of his brother's love of Ila and angry enough to be privy to the manipulation of Tubal-Cain. And as the situation grows more dire, Naameh's request of a gift from Noah's grandfather Methusaleh (Anthony Hopkins) disrupts Noah's single-minded drive and pushes him to the point of homicidal mania. So yes, to say Aronofsky and co-writer Ari Handel take some liberties with the source material is an understatement. But a straight Biblical adaptation was never in the cards anyway, even before Paramount added disclaimers to the advertising that stated as much. Obviously, one's devotion and attachment to the story will likely dictate the response, but personally, as someone who has no commitment to the Bible and whose church of choice is the big screen, I found NOAH to be exciting, ambitious filmmaking. With THE WRESTLER and BLACK SWAN, Aronofsky kept things relatively low-budget after the brilliant THE FOUNTAIN proved to be a costly (and mismarketed) flop for Warner Bros. Given the power granted to bottom-line-obsessed execs and focus-group mouth-breathers, the fact that Paramount gave Aronofsky $125 million to make NOAH and largely left him alone to make the film he wanted to make and disregarded the test audience feedback and released the director's preferred cut is a major miracle itself. Aronofsky had been toying with the idea of helming a mega-budget epic, but turned down MAN OF STEEL and left THE WOLVERINE during pre-production, opting instead to wait until the time was right for NOAH.
"What a fool belieeeeeeves...."
Aronofsky takes a huge gamble in making Noah extraordinarily unlikable and practically deranged in the second half as he'll stop at nothing to follow through with The Creator's request (as the years go on, Noah's hair grays and at times, Crowe resembles a feral Michael McDonald). Utilizing CGI and some of the same sort of minimalist visual trickery seen in THE FOUNTAIN, Aronofsky creates a visually stunning world in NOAH. The sequence detailing the onset of the flood while the ark is under attack by Tubal-Cain's men is terrifying to watch and jaw-dropping in its scope and a must-see on a large screen. Some of the stuff involving The Watchers is a little goofy (but I'm always up for some Nick Nolte grumbling) and sometimes, it feels a little too derivative of the LORD OF THE RINGS, but in an era when most multiplex movies are bland, uninspired, and interchangeable, NOAH is unique even when it's borrowing an occasional element here and there. It's the strangest Biblical epic in years and so much of it could've gone so horribly awry, that even on those rare instances where something doesn't work, you're still admiring the chutzpah of the whole endeavor. Even if you vehemently disagree with the out-of-the-box approach Aronofsky takes--and nothing's going to change your mind--the fact that NOAH even exists is proof that Hollywood might still give a shit about artistic vision.
