“Mother!” and “Battle of the Sexes.”
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.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der September 25,2017-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der September 25,2017-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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TRIPLE FAULT
A meal is never just a meal in a Luca Guadagnino movie; each bite is a prelude to a kiss, every feast a form of foreplay.
NIGHT MUSIC
“Stereophonic” and Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club” on Broadway.
LITTLE OLD HER
Is Taylor Swift doing too much?
BEASTLY MATTERS
Where the logic behind the concern for animal welfare begins and ends.
PULSE
He footed off his shoes, the logs balanced on an arm, and tugged the door shut.
TOWER IN FLAMES
What kind of right is academic freedom?
THE BATTLE FOR ATTENTION
How do we hold on to what matters in a distracted age?
ON NATIVE GROUNDS
Deb Haaland faces the cruel history of the agency she now leads.
DESIGN FOR LIVING
Can converting office towers into apartments save empty downtowns from ruin?
HOROSCOPES WRITTEN BY MY MOTHER
Your zodiac alignment this month is governed by Venus, the planet of intuition, something my daughter Bess seems to lack.