mother!

Okay: I exited the auditorium from a quarter-full screening of Darren Aronofsky’s ‘mother!’ (only two people walked out), went for a pint, got my thoughts in order, came home, poured another drink, cracked my knuckles, fired up the laptop aaaaaand … holy fuck fuckety fuck, I have no idea where to start.

I don’t know whether to write a straightforward review of the film – plot synopsis, quality of acting, effectiveness of cinematography and production design, you know, the usual kind of thing – or to come at it obliquely via a review of the reviews.

‘mother!’ – which is already starting to piss me off with its wannabe e.e. cummings fixation on lower case and its needless exclamation mark*, and I’ve only typed it three times – has been variously described, by some fairly high profile critics, as being About** the state of the nation, the Syrian refugee crisis, the creative process in general, Aronofsky’s creative process in particular, the dark side of fame/celebrity, a deconstruction of cinema itself, and the inability of Man to aspire to God because of our pettiness and selfishness.

Let’s start with the latter reading. Yes, the film is obviously a religious allegory. It’s obviously an allegory since it begins with Javier Bardem’s character (none of the characters are given names***, but Javier is billed as “Him” just to make it fucking obvious) placing a crystal on what is basically a mini-altar. What the crystal is and where it came from is revealed at the very end, but by then you’ll probably be too busy Googling Aronofsky’s address so that you can go round and punch him to care. What the placing of the crystal on the altar does is trigger a cosmic reset button: a burnt out house is restored to its basic, undecorated, structure and a lifeless husk in a bed revivifies in the form of a woman (Jennifer Lawrence). Which is basically like Aronofsky texting every member of the audience with the message None of this is real, everything’s a stand in for something else” followed by a parade of emojis, including thumbs up, fist bump, devil, angel and the shit emoji. To the best of my knowledge emojis symbolising human heart flushed down the toilet, eviscerated baby and film director giving his audience the wanker sign haven’t yet been designed, but I’m sure our Darren has put in a commission. Oh, and it also robs the film of any shred of tension – with one hour fifty-nine and a half minutes still to go.

So yes, it’s an allegory, and yes it’s a religious allegory since we have Cain and Abel (here depicted as spoiled millennial twats fighting over a will), God so loving the world that he makes a spectacularly bad parenting decision vis-à-vis His only son, and a self-aggrandising plea that said child’s death be forgiven. There’s also a tip of the chapeau towards the virgin birth inasmuch as Lawrence’s character demands of Bardem’s “how come you never fuck me?” I’m not a big reader of the Bible, but I rather think she was paraphrasing there.

But an allegory along the lines of ‘God gives us nice things but we can’t have them because we’re selfish gits’? Hmmm. Two problems: (i) the script so thoroughly puts the audience in sympathy with Lawrence’s litany of entirely reasonable requests that the exponentially burgeoning parade of interlopers put down things, stop breaking things, quit abusing her hospitality and, finally, get the hell out of her house that the only way the metaphor can work is that Aronofsky is slapping every member of the audience in the face with a j’accuse, rather than presenting them with a concept to mull over (a surefire way, in other words, to alienate rather than engage the audience), and (ii) he’s essentially cast his girlfriend as the living embodiment of humanity’s selfishness. Way to go, Romeo.

Okay. Let’s take it as a state of the nation piece instead. It’s quickly established that one’s home is not a safe place; that men treat women badly; and that slightly-embarrassed prissiness is the default mode of behaviour for the haves, spitefulness and vandalism for the have-nots and passive-aggressiveness for those stuck resentfully inbetween. As social commentary, the first two observations are thuddingly obvious and thrown out in a manner that adds nothing to any meaningful debate, while the third is reductive to the point of stupidity. The extended final act trades in the imagery of fan worship, religious cults, social upheaval, the police state, political factionism, oppression, anarchy and everything else up to and including the kitchen sink, the bathroom sink, the bath itself and most of the plumbing. Plus maybe the kettle, the teapot and most of the crockery.

As a deconstruction of cinema? That only works if it’s a genuine dismantling of the form itself (rather than the ‘High-Rise’ style orgy of onscreen destruction that it so patently is); moreover, any claim to deconstructionism is intellectually cancelled out by its plethora of borrowings: from Polanski, from Fellini, from Tarkovsky, from von Trier, from Wheatley, from Romero, from Fulci … even from Cavani if you squint hard enough. It’s a stitching together of other works, from the highbrow to the lowbrow by way of the obscure, and the only point I can see is to demonstrate just how damn much cinema Arofonsky has absorbed. Well, you know what? Tarantino does exactly the same thing, but makes it his own and never claims that he’s doing anything other than indulging a lifetime’s love of cinema. There’s no love of anything in ‘mother!’, just a leaking bile duct dribbling its nasty effluent over the screen for two hours.

An investigation into the creative process? Well, I personally know enough people who are creative – poets, musicians, novelists, filmmakers – to know that while certain terrors and traumas and obsessions go into the great melting pot of artistic creativity, none of these people are misanthropic and emotionally destructive. If ‘mother!’ is to be read as what someone has to go through in order to create – not to mention what they put those around them through, and the degree to which they leach off other lives and tragedies – then it’s possibly the greatest statement of anti-art and anti-thought and anti-creativity since Donald Trump, Theresa May and Nigel Farage were collectively conceived.

As a commentary on the Syrian refugee crisis? Only if you’re an inveterate fucking racist.

Here’s what I think it’s about, and we’re back in allegory territory: imagine that the entire history of cinema is a blog post. The people who go to the movies to be entertained are the people leaving a single comment on the comments thread that effectively washes their hands of it. The people who go to the movies to theorise and critique are the ones playing nice on the comments thread and genuinely trying to arrive at some form of collective agreement. Darren Aronofsky is the troll.


*With the sole exception of Powell and Pressburger’s ‘I Know Where I’m Going!’, exclamation marks have no freaking business in movie titles whatsoever.

**The whole thing is so stultifyingly pretentious – right down to its all-in-lower-case-except-for-one-character end credits – that it demands you accept it as being About something.

***Art film alert!

The Wrestler

I’ve heard it said that with ‘The Wrestler’ (2008) and ‘Black Swan’ (2010), Darren Aronofsky essentially made the same film. Both are expositions on the nature of performance and the gruelling offences against the human body that make said performance possible; both measure physical punishment against psychological deterioration; both assess the adulation of the crowd in terms of dysfunctionalism in “real” life. ‘Black Swan’ rigorously addresses these themes within the middle-to-upper-class realm of ballet, embracing a quasi-surreal aesthetic that, as Bryce Wilson put it, is “as if Roman Polanski and Dario Argento teamed up to remake ‘The Red Shoes’.”

‘The Wrestler’ works out its issues of fame, falsity, failure and flamboyant performance in the ring. If ‘Black Swan’ embraces the gleaming marble façades of theatre and concert hall and the shiny mirrored surfaces of the barré, ‘The Wrestler’ inhabits a milieu of trailers, sports halls, strip clubs and shitty bars. ‘Black Swan’ is the more psychologically penetrating film, ‘The Wrestler’ the more honest. Once you’ve seen them both, it’s hard to critically intuit one without filtering your perceptions through the aesthetic of the other.

Moreover, both generated their frisson from existing cinematic touchstones. As Bryce notes, ‘Black Swan’ comes across as Powell & Pressburger’s deliciously morbid fantasia stuck in a blender with ‘Repulsion’ and ‘Suspiria’. ‘The Wrestler’ has an even more immediate precursor.

In 1988, respected cinematographer Michael Seresin made his only directorial feature with ‘Homeboy’, a boxing film from a script by its star, Mickey Rourke. A glacially paced, downbeat character study, ‘Homeboy’ starts with twenty-something boxer Johnny Walker (the naming of its protagonist after a fucking horrible brand of whisky is the movie’s only real flub) moving to a coastal town and trying to put his boxing days behind him. He’s been diagnosed with brain damage, and one wrongly placed punch could kill him or turn him into a vegetable. As he struggles to form a useful life outside the ring, the promise of romantic fulfilment with carnival performer Ruby (Debra Feuer) is threatened by the svengali-esque attentions of crooked promoter Pendergrass (Christopher Walken). The denouement, in a film that plays like ‘Raging Bull’ deconstructed by Charles Bukowski, is deeply ambiguous. Feuer was Rourke’s wife at the time; they separated the following year.

To make things even more meta, Rourke had been an amateur boxer from 1964 to 1973, winning his first match as a flyweight at the tender age of 12. In 1991, disaffected with his acting career, he returned to the ring as a professional boxer, winning six of his eight fights and drawing the other two. He suffered for it, though, and some disastrous reconstructive facial surgery turned him from the pugnaciously handsome actor of ‘Angel Heart’ to the puffy-lipped, beaten-up Mickey Rourke that we’ve known for the last couple of decades.

To make things even more meta still, ‘The Wrestler’ establishes clear parallels with ‘Homeboy’, but punctures that film’s punch-drunk seriousness of purpose. Boxing is boxing. Wrestling is, at best, white trash performance art. An early seen in ‘The Wrestler’ has antagonists pair off as their bouts are announced and discuss what moves they’re going to use and how best to pander to the crowd. They hug before and after fights. Even in the climactic scene, with Rourke’s has-been Randy the Ram seemingly on the verge of a seizure in the ring, his supposed antagonist, earlier seen punching him in the face and slamming him onto the canvas, nervously whispers “Ram, are you okay?” in an almost frightened voice.

If the parallels with ‘Black Swan’ and ‘Homeboy’ are immediately apparent, so is Aronofsky’s familiarity with the established narrative beats of the sports film: the broken down old timer who used to be someone; the inability to function effectively outside of his sphere of competition; the long-shot final bout. But in Aronofsky’s hands these standard issue tropes are deconstructed and examined, and he sure as hell doesn’t give us the inspirational speechifying or the rousing and redemptive finale. Small details, which are accreted from the outset, that establish Randy’s downward spiral from his glory days of the late 1980s. The credits sequence, all ’80s cock rock, lurid green titles, sports magazine headlines and ticket stubs, establish that our hero had it all back in the day. The montage abruptly fades to black, then fades in on the Ram, in late middle aged, slumped over a child’s desk in a school classroom (he’s reduced to bouts in a school sports hall), a bright yellow toy truck positioned so that it occupies the frame more commandingly that Rourke’s slumped figure. Aronofsky withholds the “twenty years later” credit for several seconds, and probably could have lost it altogether: the visual tells us all we need to know.

Seconds into the film and it’s abundantly clear that the director knows exactly what he wants. The next three cuts focus on swathes of yellow, enough to cast aspersions of the perceived masculinity of Randy’s milieu, after which Aronofsky is savvy enough to discard colour-specific cues rather than swamp the film with them. He focuses, instead, on casually observed details of Randy’s day-to-day life, details that exist in stark contrast to his stage image: his hearing aid; his bafflement during a Nintendo match with a neighbourhood kid that Call of Duty 4 is a cooler and more sophisticated game; his hair dyed and crimped in silver foil during a visit to a hairdresser who is less than impressed by his long-faded fame; his sheepish acceptance of a bollocking at his day job by a wimpy, short-arse supervisor; his equally sheepish attempts to win the affections of an exotic dancer at a seedy club he frequents; and his not-much-more-effective overtures to his estranged daughter.

On which note, here’s to the actresses who essay the trickiest and most thankless roles in ‘The Wrestler’. Marisa Tomei plays middle-aged stripper Pam: first seen being harangued about her age by some asshole college jocks, she’s working a horrible job in a shitty dive purely to provide a start in life for her nine-year-old son. As Randy’s daughter Stephanie, Evan Rachel Wood provides a study in bristling teenage angst erected as a barrier against all the times her father wasn’t there for her; and in what is still a career-best, Wood’s character tentatively allows the defences to come down only for the Ram to screw things up just when reconciliation is feasible.

The comparisons between the Ram’s “profession” and Pam’s are telling (the rhyming nature of their names is surely no coincidence). Her gyrations on the pole, eyes glazed and a bored expression on her face even as she tries to fake a salacious look at her beer-addled, pick-up-driving audience, are as phoney as the Ram’s performances in the ring. The falsity takes their toll on both of them, but at least Pam doesn’t self-mutilate (an early scene has Randy secrete a razor blade on his person; he uses it not to nobble an opponent but to cut his own forehead open, blood being what the punters want); nonetheless, she is unable to see Randy as anything other than a customer, and the only meaningful relationship she seems to have is with her nine-year-old son. Their relationship is in stark contrast to Randy and Stephanie’s.

Aronofsky doesn’t force any of these parallels. He utilises an almost documentarist style, establishing character and location, and lets the narrative unspool at its own pace. As noted earlier, small details carry most of the weight. A stylistic device used consistently through the movie has the camera follow Randy as he goes about his day (I’m convinced Rourke’s face has far less screen time than the back of his head), so that Randy getting in the ring comes to seem no more or less significant than Randy going to work in a warehouse, Randy going to work on a deli counter or Randy walking into a shitty bar. And mostly Randy ends up adopting a persona in each of these milieus in order to get through to the end of the fight, the end of the shift or the end of the day.

In Roeg and Cammell’s counter-culture classic ‘Performance’ rock star/dissipate Turner (Mick Jagger) states his raison d’etre as “the only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness”. What Randy the Ram’s final performance achieves is left ambiguous, but the build-up makes it achingly clear that, for him, a crowd chanting his name and some doughy fan gushingly seeking an autograph is as good as it’s ever going to get.

Black Swan

I was going to save this review to bulk out the small amount of pre-prepared material I have for the next couple of weeks while I take some time out from film reviewing to work on the novel; however, I figured it would be better to post it now, ahead of the Oscar brouhaha.

Early in Darren Aronofsky’s stone-cold modern classic ‘Black Swan’, impresario Tomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) offers a 72-word synopsis of Tchaikovsky’s eternally popular ballet ‘Swan Lake’:

“We all know the story. Virginal girl, pure and sweet, trapped in the body of a swan. She desires freedom but only true love can break the spell. Her wish is nearly granted in the form of a prince, but before he can declare his love her lustful twin, the black swan, tricks and seduces him. Devastated the white swan leaps of a cliff killing herself and, in death, finds freedom.”

Leroy’s intent is for his ailing ballet company to present a new version of ‘Swan Lake’. Although he admits that “it’s been done to death”, his idea is to “strip it down, make it visceral”. With prima ballerina Beth Macintyre (Winona Ryder) retiring from the company under a storm of bad feeling, Leroy also intends on using ‘Swan Lake’ as the debut of his next leading lady. Tensions are running high as the ballerinas vie for the role.

While Leroy delivers the above synopsis, he walks among the ranks, all of them primping and preening and trying to catch his attention as they practice at the barre. He steps some of the women on shoulder. They beam with smug superiority. After he concludes his address, Leroy instructs all those he tapped to continue with their scheduled rehearsals that afternoon; the others are to attend for auditions for the Swan Queen. The smug looks vanish.

This scene is the first of many that play with expectations, pull the rug from under the audience’s (and the characters’) perceptions, and explore the theme of dualism. Even the title adheres to this aesthetic. The White Swan is the heroine of ‘Swan Lake’, the Black Swan the villainess. That both are danced by the same ballerina is the very core of the film. Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is a naïve but determined member of the company. Her entire life, shaped by the obsessive influence of her ex-ballerina mother Erica (Barbara Hershey), has led her to this audition. Damaged feet, broken toenails, endless hours at the barre, punishing self-discipline, a total negation of a social life, friends, romance. And while Leroy can’t fault the precision and perfection of her technique – Nina’s got the White Swan in the bag, no question – his big concern is whether she can convince as the Black Swan; whether she can be sensual, unpredictable and seductive. Whether she can lose control.

If duality is the aesthetic, this is the dynamic.

As Leroy – through highly questionable means (I rather think if he pulled any of his shit with the Bolshoi, there’d the sexual harassment accusations all over the place) – drives Nina towards a breakthrough as the Black Swan, the psychological implications begin to take their toll. Nina develops a rash on her shoulder which seems to be sprouting something; her already brittle relationship with Erica approaches breaking point; and she alternates between being paranoid about and attracted to Lily (Mila Kunis), a fellow ballerina who has none of the precision and control required for the White Swan, but whose sensuality and determinism to live in the moment tick all of the boxes for the Black Swan.

Aronofsky’s film – for my money his best yet, and that’s saying something for the guy who made ‘Pi’, ‘Requiem for a Dream’, ‘The Fountain’ and ‘The Wrestler’ – is at one and the same time the best film about ballet since ‘The Red Shoes’, the most visceral body horror picture this side of David Cronenberg and an astonishingly accomplished extended visual metaphor for the incremental and ultimately terrifyingly emergence of the protagonist’s dark side. A scene, during Nina’s climatic performance of ‘Swan Lake’, where she literally becomes the Black Swan is as daring, breathtaking and magnificently accomplished as anything I’ve seen on the big screen.

Moreover, this is a film which will richly reward repeated viewings. I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite as enigmatic and ripe for debating since Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Prestige’. The big question here is: how much of what happens is in Nina’s mind? And how much is the actuality which feeds her state of mind? You could watch ‘Black Swan’ a thousand times and still be debating it. In the future, book length theses will be written on this film. A myriad different conclusions will be arrived at. They’ll all be just as valid.

Aronofsky’s direction is astounding. His exerts complete control of the material, knowing far more intuitively than his heroine just when to cut loose with the visceral imagery, jarringly effective juxtapositions and the sometimes outrageous but always perfectly contextualized set-pieces. His use of black and white (the palette that defines ‘Black Swan’ so overwhelmingly that you could almost start to believe it was actually filmed in monochrome) purposefully evokes the central dynamic in frame after frame. Not just the tendency of Nina to wear white and Lily black (culminating in a metaphor redolent of troilism where Nina dons a black top of Lily’s over her own white tee-shirt) but the white walls and black doors of Nina’s apartment building, the harsh white lights of the ballet studio which are suddenly extinguished plunging the protagonists into darkness (tellingly, this happens twice); the equally harsh lights and shadowy corners of both the subway and the nocturnal streets Nina takes to get home; the dominant colours of the canvases Erica paints; the décor of Tomas’s apartment.

And then, in what can only be an homage to Powell and Pressburger’s classic, there are the sudden and garish splashes of red. The tube of lipstick Nina steals from Beth’s dressing room; the red-lipstick scrawled “whore” that Nina finds on her mirror after it’s announced she’s won the role of the Swan Queen (endlessly debatable question #1: did she write this herself?); the rash on Nina’s shoulder; the blood from her broken toenails; the red strobe lights in the disco she goes to with Lily (a scene so elliptically edited that Nina and Lily seem to merge before your eyes); a nail file coated with blood; Nina herself bathed in red backstage.

I don’t think there’s a single image in ‘Black Swan’ that doesn’t contribute to the overall meaning and/or enigma of the film (the use of mirrors is explicitly apparent). The same applies to character names. There’s a tinge of the Scottish to Beth Macintyre’s name, bringing to mind the beautiful and incredibly talented Moira Shearer, one of the most famous British ballerinas, the star of ‘The Red Shoes’ and an acclaimed actress in her own right. The fact that Beth is the outgoing prima ballerina in ‘Black Swan’, her departure leaving the stage free for a very different new soloist, is Aronofsky’s first hint to audiences that his film is going to be a very different beast to Powell and Pressburger’s. Tomas Leroy’s surname is a play on “le roi”, which is French for “the king”, indicating that while Nina may have been “crowned” (ie. picked as) the Swan Queen, the impresario still holds sway over her as he does the rest of the company. Nina and Lily have remarkably similar names: four letters, with the same first letter/third letter repetition and the same vowel as the second letter. Nina is Spanish for “girl”, appropriate to the character since her life has been subjugated to her mother’s demands. Lily is more ironic, since it means innocence, purity and beauty. A case of one out of three ain’t bad as far as the Lily of the film is concerned (or is Lily symbolic of all three and it’s just Nina’s fracturing state of mind that imposes the sensuality and promiscuity on her? Endlessly debatable question #2.)

The performances match the brilliance of Aronofsky’s direction. Portman has never been better, Kunis is a revelation, Hershey delivers a turn that’s as quietly terrifying as Billie Whitelaw in ‘The Omen’, and Cassel proves (if proof were needed) why he’s one of the best actors working today. OST providers Clint Mansell and Matt Dunkley provide an arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Swan Lake’ so cleverly done that it’s impossible to see (or should that be “hear”) the joins, while cinematographer Matthew Libatique handles the palette and the visual cues in beautifully understated style, as well as taking his camera right into the middle of the ballet (Portman utterly utterly utterly convinces) to create a swirling and vertiginous immersion in the intensity and pain of the performance.

Looking back at the 1,400 words I’ve just written, it’s a testament to the magnificence of ‘Black Swan’ that I got so much out of the film on my first viewing and that I’m counting the minutes till it’s out on DVD and I can reapproach it and re-engage with its enigmas and its visceral brutality and, despite everything, its soaring flights of undeniable beauty. ‘Black Swan’ is about as perfect as the art of cinema gets.