Anatomy of a Bad Movie

Actually, the title of this blog post is somewhat misleading. Perhaps insufferable movie would be better. Or maybe, pretentious. Or perhaps self-indulgent. Or maybe incomprehensible.

I was one of the unfortunates this weekend who shelled out 9 bucks to see Mother!. It stars Jennifer Lawrence, whose last three non-franchise X-Men or Hunger Games films* have flopped I am counting Mother! in this list. I have never been so sure that a film would die at the box office.

There are a couple of things that are interesting about Mother! One of these is how out of touch movie critics can sometimes be. I refuse to believe that the 69% Rotten Tomatoes score or the 75% Metacritc rating is based on anything other than technical prowess or sheer audacity of the film-maker. Mother's! CinemaScore (a score that rates the responses of audiences) is a quite rare F. Movie goers are generally forgiving about the films they've seen. Not with Mother! I understand completely. Many critics have compared Mother! to Rosemary's Baby and another Roman Polanski film The Tenant. This libels these films. Rosemary's Baby is a classic 1968 thriller in which Mia Farrow's character Rosemary gradually comes to learn that her husband and neighbors are in league with Mephistopheles, who also turns out to be the real father of her unborn child--a fact that is not revealed until the shocking ending. The Tenant, which at least is a little reminiscent of Mother!, concerns a Parisian tenant of an undistinguished apartment building who starts witnessing increasingly bizarre events unfold in his building. In this film the ending reveals that the tenant was hallucinating all along, because he is crazy.

The thing is that both of these films tell comprehensible stories. The Tenant does not seem comprehensible for much of its running time, but all is explained in the end. Not so with Mother! SPOILER ALERT! Mother!'s ending does nothing to explain the events that occur during the film beyond revealing that, whatever they were, they were part of a cycle of events that have apparently repeated over and over. The cause of these events, their meaning, or even their physical possibility is never broached. The only real similarity to Rosemary's Baby is that the female lead gives birth near the end of the film, and the father is definitely holding something back from his wife. However, in the case of Mother! I challenge anyone to reveal just what that is. Perhaps a better comparison would be Groundhog Day, but not really. (I'll ignore the religious symbolism in Mother! because it is not particularly coherent or clearly suggestive of Satanism.)

The other aspect of this film that struck me is how dishonest its marketing has been to the public. The trailer suggests that it is perhaps a weird family-based comedy, something along the lines of the 1981 Belushi/Ackroyd film Neighbors. I haven't quite decided what Mother! is, but whatever it is, it is not a comedy, at least not intentionally.

* Mother!, Passengers, and Joy