The “audacious” Jennifer Lawrence movie so reviled the studio was forced to publicly defend it
Darren Aronofsky is considered one of the great filmmakers of our time, largely due to his back-to-back critical darlings The Wrestler and Black Swan. But his 2017 horror-thriller starring Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem proved to be much harder to digest, due to its surrealist, allegorical storytelling.
Only two years after The Hunger Games wrapped up, Lawrence was trying out bolder movies than ever. She had already won an Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook and been nominated three more times for Winter’s Bone, Joy, and the notoriously hated American Hustle. 2016 saw her in the missed potential sci-fi adventure Passengers alongside Chris Pratt, which was followed by Aronofsky’s mother! In 2017, and then the harsh spy thriller Red Sparrow in 2018.
For starters, the marketing for mother! was confusing, as films of this nature are difficult to advertise. Aronofsky’s entry follows an unnamed married couple (Lawrence and Bardem) who live in a stately but run-down house, which the “Mother” contentedly works to fix up while He stays locked up in his office trying to recapture poetic genius. However, the peace is shattered by the arrival of a series of houseguests who grow increasingly unruly, culminating in them killing the Mother’s newborn baby.
Mother! is now widely recognised as showing the poisonous relationship between fans and an idol, or humans and God, and how this affects the creator’s partner, who may also be Mother Nature. But at the time, mother! resulted in many angry moviegoers. It grossed $44.5million worldwide on a budget of $30million and earned a rare CinemaScore of F.
Following the movie’s release, A.V. Club stated that “The CinemaScore F has become a perverse badge of pride for some films, though, a reflection of a movie that goes out of its way to artfully alienate or confuse audiences.” Certainly mother! was a more avant-garde undertaking, and the studio that distributed it stood by this aspect of it, suggesting that audiences should at least try to engage with it.
“This movie is very audacious and brave. You are talking about a director at the top of his game, and an actress at the top her game. They made a movie that was intended to be bold,” said Megan Colligan (via The Hollywood Reporter), Paramount’s worldwide president of marketing and distribution at the time. “Everyone wants original filmmaking, and everyone celebrates Netflix when they tell a story no one else wants to tell. This is our version. We don’t want all movies to be safe. And it’s okay if some people don’t like it.”
I’m not entirely sure what risky Netflix projects she believes got the consideration that mother! didn’t. I’m Thinking of Ending Things, starring Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons, is comparable, but it saw a very mixed reception, again because of a confusing, symbolic narrative. But mother!, struggling at the box office, got more of a defence, including from director Aronofsky himself.
Aronofsky spoke to THR, pointing out that the reception suggested audiences weren’t giving the film a chance at all, saying, “What’s interesting about that is, like, how if you walk out of this movie are you not going to give it an ‘F?’ It’s a punch. It’s a total punch.” Mother! has become something of a cult classic, but other films still illustrate how a bit more accessibility is the better way to make the case for originality.
