At the very beginning of last week’s Toronto film festival, all I wanted to talk about with anyone was the movie I had just seen: Darren Aronofsky’s crazily brilliant and audacious horror-thriller Mother!, all about the couple, played by Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem, to whom bad stuff happens at an exponential rate.
My friend Col Needham, founder and chief executive of the internet Movie Database, smiled and told me: “Do you know, I think it’s a Schrodinger’s movie. Inside the box, there’s a film that is very good and very bad at the same time.” Perhaps in that spirit, the Toronto Globe and Mail non-committally settled on two different star ratings for Mother!: one star (“for the Aronofsky agnostic”) and four stars (“for the Aronofsky acolyte”). I myself had been an agnostic since Aronofsky’s previous, middling film about Noah.
Anyway, Rex Reed of the New York Observer got right off the fence. “This delusional freak show is two hours of pretentious twaddle,” he said, concluding: “I hesitate to label it the ‘Worst movie of the year’ when ‘Worst movie of the century’ fits it even better.” It has now received an “F” score from the Las Vegas market research firm CinemaScore, which hands out survey cards to movie audiences and collates the results from A to F. The grades have a good record in predicting box office. F for fail is very rare. Films that have got this market research badge of shame/pride include Steven Soderbergh’s remake of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, William Friedkin’s horror film Bug, and Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly.
So it’s official: Mother! is what some pundits call a Marmite film and opinions sharply divide between those who believe the Marmite analogy is a helpful metaphor and those who think it’s a bland cliche, and I’m with the latter. I have in the past written very enthusiastic reviews of films that have gone against the derision consensus. After my rave for Nicolas Winding Refn’s widely panned and misunderstood Only God Forgives, one pundit sweetly told me that a different viewpoint made things interesting, to which I remember sweetly replying that, yes, it would be very boring if everybody got it wrong.
But what seems to be the case with Mother! is that it’s not really a matter of critics disagreeing among themselves but the critics disagreeing radically with the audiences. So how could this extreme disconnect have happened? In situations like this, some might say that the CinemaScore audiences are rejecting pretentiousness, like the little boy in the fable, telling the emperor: “Put some clothes on, puh-leez.” But it’s more about casting, marketing and storytelling.
Audiences are shocked and upset in ways they didn’t sign up for.
Some unspoken contract has been violated
Fans of megastar Lawrence have come to expect something more mainstream, more Hollywood, more reassuring. Katniss Everdeen thought she had it tough. But she never had to deal with anything like the stuff that happens in Mother!. If the film had been marketed lower on the radar, motoring along as a Euro-style shocker, keeping Bardem in his role but maybe recasting the female lead with someone like Carey Mulligan or Imogen Poots, the fan base reaction and exit word of mouth wouldn’t have been as problematic. But the chemistry might have been all wrong between the leads, and indeed between the director and his female lead, and the film might not have been so electrifyingly good.
In my review, I suggested the three films that Mother! has leant on are Luis Bu-uel’s The Exterminating Angel, Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Lars von Trier’s Antichrist: it offers surrealism, horror, arthouse provocation. Those who don’t like Mother! are those who don’t get or don’t like the third element, the deadpan black comedy it offers in the von Trier vein. But it’s also the loopy unquantifiable mix. There is no obvious genre for Mother!, which makes it very difficult to market. “Horror thriller” doesn’t really cover it, and straight horror fans would be disappointed because it doesn’t conform.
Then there’s storytelling. Basically, cineplex audiences don’t like surprises, and the whole point of this film is to up the ante again and again in a series of freaky quantum leaps in the third act. As a critic, I sometimes get into trouble for spoilerism, but really most movie trailers are pure spoiler: the customers have to be reassured that they know what they’re getting. Even horror trailers give you a taste of the jump scare. Yet for obvious reasons, the trailer for Mother! doesn’t want to give away the freaky crescendo. So audiences are shocked and upset in ways they didn’t sign up for. Some unspoken, unacknowledged consumer contract has been violated.
Something similar happened when some audiences for Michael Haneke’s arthouse stalker nightmare Hidden (2005) declared themselves to be discontent, because the trailer had led them to expect a conventional thriller. And of course a lot of it is compartmentalisation and blandness. Rosemary’s Baby was and is shocking, but I suspect that in the 70s, mainstream audiences were not so balkanised, not so hemmed into genre and simply not so conservative. Movie customers could, at least provisionally, accept the violent or scary or challenging film that happened to be playing that week at your town’s single-screen theatre. But since VHS, DVD and download, different tastes are catered for. Mother! has offended against the Amazon rule: If you like this, you’ll like ...
As for the other films in CinemaScore’s notorious F club, some of them are ropey. There is the Nicolas Cage remake of The Wicker Man, which did indeed deserve a dunce’s cap of some kind. There is Richard Kelly’s puzzler The Box, which was flawed, but not utterly terrible. But Killing Them Softly was a very good drama-thriller. And Soderbergh’s version of Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky, despite being looked at askance by some critics who thought he had no business taking on such a revered classic, was actually a very interesting, intelligent and worthwhile film. But there again, it’s a marketing mismatch. Audiences were sold a sci-fi with George Clooney and were baffled by what seemed to be a lugubrious and elusive tone.
Great films that initially suffered derision and box office disaster are a standard part of cinema myth. There is, for example, Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, which performed badly on first release and is now hailed as a classic. But there are plenty of films that flopped at first and turned out years later to be... terrible. And you can’t exactly prove the opposite by pointing to now forgotten films that won Oscars and awards because their defenders can say: Ah yes, well, this film’s time will come and it will be rediscovered.
Mother! does what movies are supposed to do: intrigue, baffle, revolt, amuse, excite and have people talking on the way out of the cinema. I’m going to see it again.
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Don’t miss it
Mother! is scheduled for an October 19 release in the UAE.
