Mother!, Ash vs Evil Dead

Jennifer Lawrence: a glazed Barbie in Mother!

Darren Aronofsky's Mother! is a mixed bag, at best. Aronofsky has skirted the heights of the American cinematic pantheon. From the highs of Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan to the low of The Fountain, Aronofsky has demonstrated his technical mastery, but also an overwrought manner. Both are exhibited in Mother!. All the technical aspects of Mother! are impeccable: editing, set design, hair and makeup, costumes, sound design and even the newfangled CGI stuff. Matthew Libatique's cinematography has a 3D like intensity that also manages to convey the cruddy colors, nauseating yellows and browns, necessary for this new installment of the sick house theme in horror.

Per usual, Aronofsky elicits interesting performances. Jennifer Lawrence's face has been planed of her apple cheeked sensuality so that she resembles a glazed Barbie chafing against artistic and patriarchal privilege. Her energetic performance gets the audience on her side and in her head. Javier Bardem is miscast as the messianic writer. He is a bit too old and doesn't provide the dark humor that a young Jack Nicholson or a Joaquin Phoenix could have provided. You know things are not going to work out well because Katniss has hitched herself to Chigurh. The support turns by the Gleeson bothers, Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer are played incisively and memorably.

However, a nagging sense of deja vu haunts the proceedings as bits and pieces of better movies dot the scenario: Repulsion, The Exterminating Angel, The Shining, The Evil Dead; and those are just the filmic references. As in even his best films, Aronofsky has over egged the pudding. In an attempt to do an auto-critique of the artist and his cult, Aronofsky hyperventilates.

Return of the boom stick: Ash vs Evil Dead

Two recent video features bear comparison to Mother!. Both are in the same subgenre, spam in a cabin. Tarantino's The Hateful Eight fails because it is stodgy and belabored, Mother! because it is overly frantic and enervated. Ash vs Evil Dead, particularly the Sam Raimi directed premier, succeeds with even more absurd material because it is directed with gleefully tossed off energy. The Hateful Eight and Mother! are painfully constructed White Elephants while the latest addition to the Evil Dead saga has the compact drive of termite art. Perhaps after the elephantine exertions of his Oz film (which I found more interesting than most), Raimi wanted to return to his pulp roots. He reunites half his Xena crew and even has New Zealand stand in for Michigan. I enjoyed watching both The Hateful Eight and Mother! once, but will go back to Raimi's Evil Dead projects repeatedly for pleasure. (1/19/18)