'mother!' and the Cliffs of Audacity
Darren Aronofsky's new film mother! is not subtle and not careful. But like a lot of art, it lives right on a dangerous spot where too much daring is just showing off.
What is it fair to reveal about Darren Aronofsky's new film, mother!? Certainly what little the trailers and marketing have given away, which is that it stars Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem as a couple (identified only as "Mother" and "Him") living in a house where something is not right. Probably that a Rebecca Solnit adaptation of The Lord's Prayer called Mother's Prayer was handed out on a thick card before the film screened at the Toronto International Film Festival. There is no chance that Aronofsky didn't know that this positioned him to look like a cornball, like a try-hard. Before the film even started, Aronofsky was inviting one of its earliest audiences to find it insufferable, overdetermined, pretentious and vain.
It may
