FilM

Mommy issues

Writer-director Darren Aronofsky is a nut, and his latest film, Mother!, is one helluva nutty movie.

Jennifer Lawrence is currently dating Aronofsky, a fact that infiltrates the mood of Mother! because the film takes unabashedly nasty aim at relationships— among its many targets. Those targets also include the Bible, narcissism, celebrity, art, family, smoking and, oh, yeah, motherhood. By the time it’s over, you might not know exactly what went down, but you know that it landed on the side of cynicism—highly stylized, lunatic, entertaining cynicism.

Lawrence plays Mother, an apparently kindhearted partner to Him (Javier Bardem). They live in an oldstyle country house out in the middle of nowhere. Him is a writer, going through some major writer’s block and occasionally speaking of having lost everything in the past to a fire. He has some sort of crystalized object on a stand that he claims empowered him to move on after the fire. It’s in a room nobody is allowed to enter alone.

They live a quiet life in their little Eden, Mother preparing meals while Him tortures himself, unable to produce a single word for his next great work. Then, there’s a knock at the door. It’s Man (Ed Harris), soon to be followed by Woman (Michelle Pfeiffer), a strange couple who wind up houseguests thanks to Him’s hospitality, and much to the chagrin of Mother.

Man and Woman invade Mother’s space, with Man huffing cigarettes and frequently vomiting from illness while Woman swills alcohol and asks Mother extremely personal questions. Eventually, Man and Woman’s two sons show up and, if you’ve read the Bible, you can perhaps guess what happens when the whole family is under one roof. After a rage-inspired sex session, Mother becomes pregnant, and Him is suddenly fertile with ideas. He writes his next big thing, and their home is besieged by agents, fans, religious zealots, paparazzi, former SNL cast members, policemen, soldiers, terrorists and fire. If there’s a takeaway from Mother!, it’s that Aronofsky doesn’t have the most pleasant attitudes toward celebrity and Sunday school.

Lawrence delivers her rawest, sometimes angriest performance to date. Her character starts off placid and collected, but as more people show up and more things get broken in her home, Lawrence gets a chance to ratchet things up to psychotic levels. There’s something seething under the surface with Mother, and Him’s refusal to kick the invaders out of their home brings it to the surface.

Bardem brings a “golly gosh, gee whiz” quality to Him, interspersed with his own scary outbursts. I think both Lawrence and Bardem went to therapy after wrapping this one. Harris is great as the first unwanted guest, clearly dying from something but still able to do naughty things with the wife while the door’s open. Pfeiffer owns her role in a way that marks her best work in years. She only has a few scenes, but all of them, especially one with Mother in the laundry room, leave a mark. The same can be said for Kristen Wiig, who takes a few minutes of screen time in a late-inthe-film appearance and kills it.

This is Aronofsky’s second take on Biblical themes. He treated the story of Noah like it was The Lord of the Rings a few years back, and now he’s treating it like Rosemary’s Baby meets The Shining. The film deals with creation in a way that ties into art, the universe, broken sinks and being left out of somebody’s will. At times, it’s absolute chaos, but Aronofsky, the master behind Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan and The Fountain (another of his creationism meditations), keeps it all under control. Longtime collaborator Matthew Libatique provides impeccable cinematography yet again, making a total rebellion inside a country home look somehow realistic and perhaps even possible.

If you like your stories and scares straightforward, there’s a good chance Mother! will frustrate you. However, if you’ve been having recent conversations about the puzzler that was David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, and you’ve watched Aronofsky’s The Fountain more than once, Mother! might be right up your alley. Ω

“Don’t worry ... the Hunger Games are over.”

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3Annabelle: Creation Annabelle, the creepy doll from The Conjuring movies, gets her second standalone film with Annabelle: Creation, a silly movie that’s nevertheless enjoyable thanks to some deft direction and surprisingly competent acting. The movie holds together thanks to solid performances from Talitha Bateman and Lulu Wilson, the latter being the same child actress who gave incredible work in the also surprisingly good prequel/sequel to a so-so movie, Ouija: Origin of Evil. The film is full of good performances from the likes of Miranda Otto, Anthony LaPaglia and Stephanie Sigman, but it’s Bateman and Wilson who get most of the credit for pulling it off. The film is set many years before the first Annabelle movie, with orphans Janice (Bateman) and Linda (Wilson) on their way to a new home, a group of other girls and happy nun Sister Charlotte (Sigman) at their side. Once at their new home, the doll is discovered, and the resulting playtime totally sucks ass. Last year, director David F. Sandberg delivered a decent genre film with Lights Out, based on his terrifically scary short film. (Talitha’s younger brother, Martin Bateman, starred in that one.) Sandberg also makes good-looking movies. The authentic Southern Gothic look of this film lends to its credibility.

3Atomic Blonde Charlize Theron goes on a tear for the ages in this fun if somewhat shallow venture, another pin on her action hero lapel after her ferocious turn as Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. As Lorraine Broughton, an undercover agent on a mission in Berlin in the late ’80s as the wall begins to fall, she showcases her ability to kick people through walls with the best of them. She also shows how to use a freezer door as a weapon. Directed by David Leitch, one of the directors of the original John Wick and future director of Deadpool 2, Atomic Blonde pops with the same kind of kinetic energy as Wick when the bullets and kicks are flying. Also a legendary stuntman, Leitch knows how to make a hit look real, and the choreographed action scenes in this film stand as some of the year’s best. When Charlize lands a blow in this movie, you feel it in your face. Based on the graphic novel The Coldest City, the film drags at times, especially when Lorraine does the standard interrogation room narrative scenes with Toby Jones and John Goodman drilling her for answers.

4It The benefit of a movie like Andy Muschietti’s It is that the director and his writers can keep some core themes that worked in the novel but streamline the narrative to make the story work a bit better 30 years after it was written. In that respect, the new It is a triumph. While the 1990 TV miniseries dealt with both the young and older versions of The Loser’s Club, the posse of kids that stand up to evil, the new It stands as Part One, completely dividing the kid and adult stories. There’s also a major time change, with the kids’ story taking place in the late ’80s instead of the ’50s. Thank you, Stranger Things. The core story remains the same: Children in Derry, Maine, have been disappearing for many years, and the film starts with the sad case of Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott), a little boy in a yellow rain slicker who follows his paper boat to the sewer drain and makes an unfortunate acquaintance. That acquaintance is Pennywise, the sewerdwelling clown, played as a savage beast by Bill Skarsgard. The big difference between Tim Curry’s Pennywise from the TV miniseries and the new incarnation is that Curry’s Pennywise was almost a normal circus clown until he sprouted monster teeth and took you out. He was into trickery. Skarsgard’s Pennywise is a shit-assed, makeup-cracking, straight-up scary demon clown with an ability to charm for a short while, but he just kind of sucks royally from the get-go, oozing with evil. The kids are great. The standout is Sophia Lillis as Beverly Marsh. Lillis has that kind of leading-lady-ina-teen-film commanding screen presence. It: Part Two, with the adults, while not official yet, is a certainty. As for It: Part One, it draws the best elements of King’s work and comes out a frightening winner.

2The Limehouse Golem Bill Nighy plays Inspector Kildare, commissioned by Scotland Yard to find the notorious Golem Killer, a Jack the Ripper-type serial killer. Based on a 1994 novel that incorporated actual historical figures like Karl Marx, Juan Carlos Medina’s movie is good-looking, and Nighy is a fun sort of cranky Sherlock Holmes. Problem is, the mystery itself isn’t that absorbing, and a side plot involving the murder trial of a local actress (Olivia Cooke) fails to engage. Granted, it is pretty cool that Medina somehow manages to stage a hypothetical scene where Karl Marx commits a very bloody murder. There are a few macabre moments, like that one, that work well. Not enough to make this anything really worth watching. Cooke labors hard in the role of Lizzie Cree, a stage actress in a bad marriage who becomes an object of sympathy for Kildare as he goes through his list of suspects which include a local actor/playwright, a doctor and, yes, Karl Marx. The movie is weird, but it’s not weird enough, and Nighy’s decent performance is ultimately wasted. (Available for rent and download on iTunes and Amazon.com during a limited theatrical release.)

2Logan Lucky A gang of losers plots to rob a NASCAR racetrack on one of its busiest weekends, and they do it in a hackneyed way that makes absolutely no sense. Steven Soderbergh comes out of retirement to direct Channing Tatum as Jimmy Logan, a former football player who has fallen on bad times, then suddenly gets it in his head to rob the racetrack in a way that involves sneaking people out of prison, blowing things up with gummy bears, and secret allies within the establishment. Soderbergh did the Ocean’s Eleven movies, the first of which has a reasonably fun and inventive heist. This one is sort of Ocean’s Eleven for rednecks, and their ability to pull off the heist is totally unconvincing. The film is almost saved by some of the supporting performances, including Daniel Craig as an incarcerated safe cracker who digs hard boiled eggs, and Adam Driver as Jimmy’s one-armed brother. But, for every character that’s a plus, there’s a lame one, like Seth MacFarlane’s heavily accented millionaire that’s not as funny as he thinks he is. The movie doesn’t come together in the end, and its robbery scheme is too cute to be realistic. The big reveal feels like a cheat. It’s good to have Soderbergh back in action, but this is just a rehash of something he’s done before with a Southern accent.

4Wind River If you’re a fan of last year’s excellent modern Western Hell or High Water, you have some big reasons to get yourself into a theater for Wind River. Taylor Sheridan, who writes and directs, has a wordsmith’s way of capturing American dilemmas on par with the likes of Sam Shepard and Cormac McCarthy. The man knows how to pen a great thriller with depth, and his works—he also wrote Iscariot and Hell or High Water—have in common a somber tone. This is a guy who knows that many of the people you pass on the street today are dealing with an eternity of grief and loss. They are making it, but it’s a bitch, and it’s not going to get easier. Wind River marks Sheridan’s second feature directorial effort, after 2011’s low-budget Vile, and it stands as one of the summer’s best films. It’s a solid mystery-thriller and a showcase for two fierce performances from Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen—yes, Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch. They both offer up career-best work, with Renner searing the screen as Cory, a man with a tragic past, paid to hunt wolves and lions on a Native American reservation. Olsen commands her screen time as Jane, one of cinema’s gutsiest FBI agents since Clarice Starling. With this film, Renner has been tasked with some of the more difficult, emotionally brutal scenes an actor has had to handle this year.