ARONOFSKY'S MOTHER! / BETWEEN THOUGHT AND EXPRESSION

Lou Reed once wrote: between thought and expression/ lies a lifetime.
These lines perfectly capture the feeling that lingers after watching Aronofsky's Mother!

Aronofsky is basically famous for 3 films: Pi, Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan.
Each of those movies sprung controversy among both the audience and the critics.
It's fair to say he is one of those directors you either love or you hate.
I'm not a huge fan of his work but I alwayws enjoy his movies because they often
take a somewhat different approach and give you a lot to think about as you are
leaving the cinema and that's sort of the point of watching movies, isn't it?
Anyway, Mother! is one of those movies that get stuck in your head for days.

This movie is all about symbolism. The symbols are layered on top of each other
and there isn't really much going on plot-wise. All of the ''action'' is mostly
achieved with unconventional directing and uses of the camera, rather than
dialogue or a familiar dramatic structure (exposition - rising action - climax -
falling action - denouement or, in other words, something we are used to.

WHAT DO WE KNOW?

We know very little, if anything.
There is this couple (Him & Her, no names) living in an octogonal house in
the middle of nowhere. She's a housewife and he is a famous writer currently
struggling with writer's block. He lost the house and all of his possesions
(all but one crystal) in a fire and she rebuilt the house and moved in with him.
That's it. That's all we get - barely enough to relate to the characters.
There they are, going about their lives when, suddenly, a doctor arrives
mistaking the house for a bed & breakfast and He, for reasons unknown,
decides to invite him to stay for a couple of days. That's the basic plot.

CAMERA

The camera is mostly 2 hours of Jennifer Lawrence's face. This creates an insane amount
of anxiety for the viewer because we never see what's going on and only see the facial
reaction of the character, not to mention the constant feeling that something will appear
behind her back or jump in front of her face. This tension goes on throughout the movie
and at times becomes almost unbearable. The other interesting thing is the spacial
layout of the house that reminded me of the Shining: we know the house is octogonal,
we know that it has several floors but because we mostly only see J. Lawrence's face, it's
impossible to create a mental picture of the layout of the house as well as determining
how big the house is or how many rooms there are. Similar to the Shining, this creates
an all around anxious confusion and it seems that the house is endless and yet confined.

BUNUEL AND THE SURREAL

In the Exterminating Angel by L. Bunuel, people simply can't leave the room.
In Mother!, Jennifer Lawrence never leaves the house, not even in time of
great danger. Instead, she locks herself in. The farthest she goes from the
house is the front porch. The important thing is that she can leave the house
at any time, she just chooses not to. This is sort of like a reverse Bunuel, only
she doesn't leave the house because she can't but because she won't. She
feels safe in the house even when the house is all but safe and there are
many occasions when she begs Him (J. Bardem) to just ''get back in''.
In The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, people are coming to the
dinner party. Here, people are also constantly coming to the house
but are never invited and after they arrive they start feeling at home
and acting bizzare, touching everything and going in all the rooms.
Every time Lawrence says ''get out of MY house'', the laugh and
reply ''oh, she thinks it's HER house'' and keep on intruding.

THE POET, THE CREATION AND PHILANTHROPY

As I mentioned before, her husband is a famous poet struggling with creation.
In order to create, he needs constant stimuli from other people. That's why
he invites everyone to stay at the house and to feel at home. His philanthropy
is so immense people eventually start worshipping him as a deity and competely
invading his private space. On the other hand, She is the one that cleans up their
mess, she is the one who rebuilt his home that is now being torn down, she is the
one trying to keep their privacy, she is the one trying to keep it all together but
ends up constantly disregarded. That leads us to symbols.

SYMBOLS

In one of the interviews, Aronofsky said that he wanted to right about Mother Nature,
trying to imagine the worst possible things we do to her. Lawrence can indeed be
the personification of Mother Nature constantly being abominated by the human race:
people invade her space, people destroy the house that she just rebuilt (like nature does),
people eventually kill her baby and almost beat her to death. The other possibility is
that she is the depiction of the Mother Mary and that the child she is trying to protect
but fails is in fact Jesus Christ. There is also a possibility she is Heaven and he is Hell
and everything that happens is the contrast of the inability of Heaven and Hell coexisting
together in the same place and time. The house may also represent the Garden of Eden
that they must not ever abandon because all the evil and the cruelty come from the outside.

In the end, it's hard to put a final word on the experience this movie leaves you with.
I could go on for ages about the various aspects of the film but in this case, words
may fail and I just might leave you with a bunch of spoilers.
It's not the best of films but it's not the worst either.
I think this just might be one of the more interesting and thought provoking
movies I've seen in a while.