Review: ** mother!
mother! Oh, Brother!
t’s being sold as a haunted house movie, but writer/director Darren Aronofsky’s mother! has much weightier things in mind; nothing less than the deconstruction of a few millennia of Judeo-Christian doctrine and an exploration of the symbolism that has surrounded those two great Western faiths from their beginnings.
In this rare case, the marketers got it right. Aronofsky (Noah, Black Swan) should have gone for the scares and abandoned his spiritual musings in the script’s first draft.
Yes, the walls bleed (the floors, too) and strange sounds emanate from dark corners of the big old house that serves as the film’s sole locale. These and other portent-heavy phenomena bedevil the unnamed couple who live there, a tortured poet (Javier Bardem), anguished over his inability to follow up his first, acclaimed work, and his dutiful wife (Jennifer Lawrence), who busies herself day after day painting and plastering walls and preparing sumptuous meals, professing to create a “paradise” for her writer-blocked hubby.
The pair seem like a nicely balanced, closed social system, until into their lives one day drops a mysterious (READ MORE)
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