Since director Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, mother!, opens with a glimpse of Jennifer Lawrence’s charred face, we know no good will come of her. In the first full scene, she reaches across the bed to find an empty space where her husband (Javier Bardem) should be; it's the first sign of a hairline crack in their marriage that widens into an unbridgeable canyon.
Eventually, her character, unnamed in the movie but pretentiously identified in the credits as Mother (even worse, Bardem is Him), becomes pregnant. It’s the most difficult cinematic childbirth since Rosemary’s Baby and the ending is worse still. Like the Roman Polanski film, mother! examines an artist’s demonically selfish ambition and the toll his need for gratification charges on his unfortunate helpmeet. However, Satan is never named in mother! whose dark forces emerge unbidden.
Act one of mother! dawdles with introducing its central characters. Him is a blocked poet, staring at the blank page, while mother, still nowhere near motherhood in a marriage with little sex, is happy trying to make the perfect home out of their sprawling, fixer-upper mansion in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere. Yet: not entirely happy. Him is amicable but emotionally absent; he tries to write and she can’t help. And then one night, a knock on the door becomes the spring setting the story in motion.
Enter Ed Harris (identified as Man), claiming to be an orthopedic surgeon in need of a place to stay. Man says he thought the house was a bed and breakfast but his wheezy, grizzled demeanor suggests he’s no physician. When he lights a cigarette, Mother insists there is no smoking in her home, but he puffs away anyway. It’s the opening shot: she is about to lose control of her carefully curated environment. The stage set for the life she planned is about to come apart.
Before long, Man’s wife, naturally named Woman (Michelle Pfeiffer), pops in and begins an almost systematic violation of Mother’s personal space by sharply questioning why she has no children, entering closed rooms, using the kitchen without asking, even having sex with Man with the guestroom door half open. And then their grown sons show up acting as if they own the place. An inexplicable family argument ensues. One son kills the other. Pretty soon a party of grieving family and friends arrive for a wake, bearing food and treating the house as their ashtray.
Him doesn’t mind at all after all, Man and Woman are fans of his work, which is why they sought him out, and the death of their son allows him to bask in the role of poet-sage. The scenario has the socially transgressive flavor of a Harold Pinter play but with an added layer. Mother’s field of vision sometimes swims; a light bulb explodes for no reason; blood runs in streams along the cellar wall. Her hallucinatory paranoia suggests Catherine Deneuve’s character from another Polanski film, Repulsion.
And then comes act two and the story goes bughouse as a chaotic swarm of Him’s fans descend upon the house, where the by-now seriously pregnant Mother has prepared an elaborate dinner for two. The visitation turns into a riot of vandalism, an out-of-bounds rave party, a war with bullets flying and bodies falling and Him doesn’t mind too much because he’s the center of attention. His ego is fed by a literal cult of worshippers that gather candles before an altar made of his photographs.
While some of the imagery is compelling, Aronofsky falls into the trap of contemporary horror directors for whom enough is never enough and subtlety is sacrificed for visual overkill. As with several of his films, notably The Fountain, arty affectation crowds out story and theme, even if the disruptive call of inspiration and the danger of adulation poke through the bloody mayhem. Lawrence gives an excellent performance as a sweet-natured neurotic compulsive. Bardem draws from a deep reserve of darkness.
