There are a number of classic paranoia films made in Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s. The Manchurian Candidate is one of these, as is Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation.
The Parallax View (1974) by Alan J. Pakula clearly belongs on the list as well. It’s a classic, it’s memorable, it’s iconic. It has its finger on the pulse of a country and a culture where politics and murder have been intertwined for more than a century.
And sadly, I like it a lot less than those films.
Let’s face it: Darren Aronofsky’s mother! is not the best nor the worst movie of the year, or the decade, or of all of movie history. It’s an average piece of art from a filmmaker who, after making Noah in 2014, has used another narrative from the Bible, i.e. the Garden of Eden, mixed it with ecological concerns, and made a mildly interesting story out of it. The main problem I have with mother! is its lack of surprise for all of its two hours. Once you get that the Jennifer Lawrence character is some kind of Eve and ecological earth mother whose universe is the house she lives in, the rest sort of falls into place. The movie has only three kinds of scenes: Lawrence’s point of view, Lawrence in the frame, or shots over her shoulder. It’s the earth mother’s story and how her realm gets invaded by careless, selfish humans. She has built that house herself and will never leave it – the porch is as far as she will go. She can feel the house’s beating heart getting poisoned by unwanted intruders. The invasion is gradual, but unstoppable, and you know well before the end that we will be back at the beginning, where the house is in flames, with the earth mother dying in it, and her husband placing a diamond on its little altar so that the house can heal again. And so on. Continue reading
Joon-ho Bong’s Mother is a twofer. It’s inconsistent in tone and theme and wants to rush through a lot of plot in a short time. It contains scenes that are unclear and lead nowhere even on a second viewing. It seems to tell two stories at once, but never really manages to convince its audience that they should be in the same film.
The crucial story driving the plot is a murder whodunit. There is a teenage son who drinks half the night and then staggers back home at night. Suddenly there’s a young girl walking in front of him. He calls out to her, but she disappears into a dark, empty house. The son can’t figure out if she was really there and has all but forgotten about her in the morning. Then she turns up dead on the flat roof of the house she disappeared in. He is a suspect because, well, he’s been seen with the victim near the house.
The other story is his mother who is determined to do everything in her power to prove that her son is innocent. It doesn’t help that the boy is naïve, bordering on mental deficiency. Why else would he grin like a fool while he demonstrates to the police how he carried the girl up onto the roof? But I digress – it’s the mother who plays the biggest part in the film. She raises money for a lawyer who turns out to be useless. On a hunch, she goes to get evidence at the house of her son’s best friend, whom she considers bad company, and to her own surprise really finds a golf club with a blood smear on it. It’s bad luck that the friend comes home with his girlfriend, and so the mother hides behind the curtains, golf club in hand, while the couple is budy shagging. That scene is close to comedy, while the girl’s murder (which happens off-screen) is a scary bit of atmospheric horror.
There is a beautiful scene where the mother walks through a field of tall pale grass and then does a little dance. It’s a throwaway scene, and I am not sure what it means, but it pays homage to the actress, to Hie-ya Kim, who is said to be one of the most famous stage actresses in South Korea.
I think the scenes with the zealous mother work well, but are uneven – they venture from pathos to horror to farce and back. She is not an avenging angel, but cares for her only child because she is convinced that he is innocent. As a character study, the movie is admirable. The whodunit is less successful because there seem to be two or even three ways the crime could have been committed. I am not at all against open endings, but three possibilities seem a bit much for a movie that is plot-heavy and contains a fair number of red herrings.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 