'mother!' and the new genre-of-meaning cinema
(Editor's note: Major plot spoilers below. Though we maintain this movie is innately unspoilable.)
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By now you've almost certainly made up your mind about Darren Aronofsky's "mother!," even if you haven't seen the film - maybe especially if you haven't seen it.
The latest release from the director of "Black Swan" and "Noah," starring Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem, of course generated all kinds of early fan buzz, then all sorts of weird and weirdly avoidant critical reactions, then all kinds of viewer confusion, then all sorts of flop pronouncements - all while a surprisingly high percentage of professional film writers seemed to care little about the film's deeper meaning. Congressional health care reform has been less of a muddle.
Everything you need to know about the movie's image difficulties can be summed up by, well, how people summed it up.
Ostensibly a horror-tinged domestic drama about a poet and his wife in a country house beset by unknown guests, "mother!" is actually pretty clearly an alternate take on biblical history as well as a
