And so it is here in Mother!. Jennifer Lawrence is the titular character, with a strong supporting cast who play characters named in the credits only by their roles. We experience Lawrence's character's world via carefully-constructed pov directorial choices. For the first third of the film she suffers from confusing memory lapses as her husband tries to deal with a variety of visitors to the house who appear to know her. By the middle of the film the visitations have grown stranger and stranger to the point of absolute chaos. The entire landscape of the house changes from shot to shot as violence and debauchery break out around her. Throughout there is a visual metaphor that hints at blood, loss and a broken heart. Eventually she gives birth to a child and it gets stolen and eaten by a crowd. Then everything falls to dust before the world appears to reset and we sort of cut back to where we were at the start. And then it ends.
The film is an attempt to create a motion picture artwork installation in mainstream cinemas. Doubtless Aronofsky has done extremely well to film in a way that emphasises the 1st person perspective, in some ways this remains the holy grail of cinema as an art form and so recognition deserves to go his way. This plus the set design and editing have to be applauded for seamlessly switching between the nightmarish visions that encroach changeably on the house. But - and this is the question we do love to level at abstract art - what does it mean?
My interpretation of events is the main protagonist is someone who has undergone a deep psychological trauma as a result of either a failed childbirth, or the loss of a child. We are seeing various events from her viewpoint, inside the mind of someone who has gone insane but who's mind is still trying to rationalise the world. As such events happen without cause, people arrive in the house who know her but she doesn't appear to know, the walls of her home appear to fall apart around her sanity crumbles away. Eventually the memory of the death of her child resurfaces in the film's bloody concluding scenes.
Subsequent investigations online have led me to discover that my interpretation isn't what the director intended at all. Aronofsky has stated that the film is a retelling of the garden of eden story in which Jennifer Lawrence is mother earth, Javier Bardem is god, Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer are Adam and Eve and all the mental stuff that happens are bible stories. All the other characters in the book are people raping and pillaging the earth while mother earth looks on in utter despair and an unintervening god is more interested in the collecting adulation of his human creations. The house is the garden of eden and the presence of the people is slowly destroying it. One supposes that the baby is Jesus, and everyone eating him is the sacrifice on the cross. This is what happens when you don't go to Sunday school - you don't see this shit before it's pointed out.
Anyway, if you don't want to worry too much about all this then Mother! is enjoyably dizzying and terrifying in equal measure. Watching it is like experiencing someone else's nightmare, and in that sense it is worth checking out. Just don't tell me I didn't warn you if you emerge from the experience feeling like you've woken up from a very (very) bad dream.
