Darren Aronofsky is one of the few directors willing to let "the bad guy win," so long as we expand our notion of characters beyond mere flesh and into the realm of the conceptual.
Requiem for a Dream is a movie in which addiction itself is the protagonist, the underdog clawing for purchase and success against the wishes of virtually everyone in the film. The Wrestler and Black Swan are both films about the artistic compulsion to perform, the addiction to adoration and excellence in a given medium—even at the expense of love, of health, of life itself. Speaking of life, death—its inevitability and the meaning it provides the living—is the animating force of The Fountain, a fate to be welcomed rather than struggled against. And if you're not cheering for the flood in Noah, you're probably doing it wrong.
Which brings us to mother!, Aronofsky's meditation on faith—or, perhaps more accurately, the uselessness of faith, the grotesquerie of the being that demands belief and craves love yet has none to give in return.
The camera opens briefly on a burning woman before we cut to Javier Bardem, his character unnamed, placing a glowing rock on a pedestal. A house in ashes magically regenerates—blackened tile reverts to pearly white; scorched wood turns blonde again—and the comforter on a king size bed fills like a balloon into a human-shaped lump. Jennifer Lawrence, also unnamed, awakes where the inflation occurred, rolls over, wonders where her man is. She wanders the mansion within which she has risen, traveling the circular floor plan in an effort to locate her beau. The two are peaceful here in this quiet space, set off by themselves in a grassy enclave ringed by trees, protected from the predations of the outside world.
He is a poet who can no longer write; she is his companion, rebuilding the home they share while he tries to get the creative juices flowing again. Their peace is interrupted when Man (Ed Harris) intrudes upon their little patch of paradise. A fan of the poet, Man and his Woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) bring chaos in the form of their two sons. The elder slays the younger by bashing him in the head with a blunt object after Man and Woman disobey the house's rules, touching (and destroying) a forbidden object in the poet's study.
It's the Bible, dummies, and Aronofsky's showing it like no one's ever shown it before: this is the story of the greatest narcissist ever told. The Poet, the Maker, the Mythmaker: he just wants to create and to be loved by, and for, his creation. He's willing to sacrifice his lover and his son and his believers and anyone else in order to keep that love flowing.
God's a real sonofabitch, basically.
As an agnostic who quite enjoys Aronofsky's highly stylized films and has been known to cheer for the "bad guy" from time to time, I should be the target audience for this movie about faith and the petty demands of the deity who demands it. But the only thing more annoying to your average agnostic than your average Bible-thumper is your average angry atheist. And mother! comes across as the Richard Dawkins of religiously minded pseudo-philosophical cinema: ugly and hectoring and entirely too sure of its self-righteousness.
No small measure of skill went into crafting this film; Aronofsky, whose body of work I adore, is a talented director who understands the ways in which the camera can be used to stoke tension and generate apprehension within the viewer. His camera swirls around Lawrence in tight spirals, rarely giving us a moment to get our bearings, leaving us just as confused as she herself must be when rampaging hordes invade her pristine space and demand the attention of her overwhelmed poet. Aronofsky lingers in close up on Lawrence's face, reducing our sense of space and centering all the action on her; except for the opening and closing moments, there isn't a shot in the film in which she is not the focus. Lawrence herself is often seen running in circles, round and round, repeating her footsteps as she tries to track the chaos in her home, a tic that visually hints at the ouroboros the Poet has built for himself.
Bardem's portrait of the artist as God, simultaneously craving adoration while remaining totally oblivious to the needs of those around him, feels like a sly in-joke, one director's admission that he and his brethren can be real pricks at times. Lawrence's Mother is a sort of Gaia, a voluptuous, put-upon fertility icon destined to be destroyed by those crawling on her surface, demanding more and more from an entity whose love is precious, a diminishing resource.
The skill that went into crafting mother! is undeniable—the final thirty minutes or so are as relentless as they are nasty—but so is its unpleasantness, its aggressively nihilistic and misanthropic ugliness. I can't quite tell whether I hate the movie or just its message, but mother! may be one of the rare artistic instances in which this is a distinction without a difference.