CEITEDMOFO
Banned
Some Reviews
Praising the cinematography of Matthew Libatique and production design of Philip Messina — another common thread across reviews, alongside plaudits for a cast headed by Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem — McCarthy writes that mother! is "above all a portrait of an artist who has untethered himself from any and all moral responsibility, one so consumed by his own ego and sense of creative importance that he’s come to believe that nothing and no one remotely competes with the importance of his work."
The notion that mother! might have autobiographical meaning is raised by The Daily Beast's Marlow Stern, who argues that the pic is "ultimately concerned with the parasitic nature of the male artist; how he drains the lifeblood from all those around him in the name of creativity and ego fuel. In that sense, it’s a remarkably self-absorbed film, and one that, allegorical or not, feels like an agonized mea culpa from the artist (Aronofsky) to those in his personal orbit." (Stern also writes, "[T]his is a film designed to fu*k with you. And fu*k with you it does." That is, I believe, a recommendation.)
For Ben Croll of IndieWire, mother! is "too hazily figurative to be in any way autobiographical," but nonetheless comes across as more than just "another baroquely orchestrated big-screen freak-out in the vein of Black Swan (though it is very much that)." Instead, Croll says, Aronofsky "sends his characters into a nightmarish dreamscape that grows and evolves, particularly in the bonkers last third, which builds in pitch, scope and sheer cinematic audacity, picking up overt religious and political resonance."
