A Woman's Work

“Mother!” and “Battle of the Sexes.”

- Anthony Lane

There is nothing wrong with slapping an exclamation point onto the name of a movie, especially if it involves people inflating the bellows of their lungs and bawling out a tune— as in “Oklahoma!,”“Oliver!,” or “Hello, Dolly!” Straight drama, by and large, can do without the boost; had Chekhov plumped for “Uncle Vanya!,” say, there would have been a discernible loss of finesse. In the case of Darren Aronofsky’s new film, “Mother!,” the punctuation should be read as a public-health warning: This movie is insane.

Jennifer Lawrence plays a woman who is listed in the end credits as Mother, though she has no children when the film begins. She is married to a poet named Him ( Javier Bardem). As yet, disappointingly, they do not have a dog called Dog. They live in a stark but beautiful house, currently getting the shabbychic treatment, in the middle of nowhere. The wife, busy plastering, declares, “I want to make a paradise.” On the rare occasions when we see it from the outside—most of the action unfolds within—it seems like the only house in the world. The poet owned an earlier dwelling on the site, but it burned down, leaving a lump of golden crystal that he found in the ashes. It sits in his inner sanctum, where he likes to compose, undisturbed; or, rather, where he would compose, were it not for a nasty case of writer’s block, compounded by failure of another kind, the poor lunk. He just can’t get it—or, as we should probably say, It—up.