Mother!

The exclamation mark reads several ways. Of course it’s a celebration — of the maternal, the feminine -- an exultation.

It also makes the title a call for help, a summons/prayer to the Eternal Feminine to restore our lost humanity. 

It’s our rededication to Mother Earth, which The Woman here rebuilds as her husband’s house, a cold dark stuffy — masculine — mansion feminized by the bleeding vaginal wound on the floor and the uterine tunnel discovered under the basement. The man moves through the rooms unawares — it’s his empire so he ignores it. The woman feels its pulse, shares an organic connection to it, sees life-forms flushed down aborted or throbbing in the material walls. 

When both women from their bed initially call their absent lover with “Baby?” the romantic and submissive briefly supplant the woman’s fertility and power, her creative as well as mythic force.  

It’s also a reassertion of the dominance of the feminine character, as in the two leads’ exchange over the newborn baby. His “I am his father” is trumped by her “I am his mother!” But she loses when he exploits her momentary loss of consciousness. His vanity and hunger for power prove catastrophic.

However else it’s read, this film is about the clash of the male and female creative principles. It claims the impropriety and destructiveness of the male’s advantage. The man exults in the woman’s pregnancy until he swells with arrogance and vanity from the eruption of his new poem and its extraordinary public reception. His vanity destroys their world, as his egotism destroys each successive muse, each lover, when he plucks from her gut her crystalline love. 

The madness of the mob is a contemporary image of the destructiveness that results from serving the male authority, whether in politics, art or mythology, from serving the macho strut over the nurturing maternal. Xavier Bardem is perfectly cast as a macho poet of both literary and sexual impotence. His resurgence into power makes his strength an even greater weakness that costs him his world. 

Of course there are other themes, like the fugitive parallels to biblical history. It opens with the first visitors, an echo of he Jewish Edenic beginning. The central couple proceeds to a Catholic pseudo-Jesus birth and communion. These echoes of dominant faiths conclude in the nihilistic anarchic end. Horror movies are always a kind of religious experience, summoning the fear of the supernatural if not our supportive faith in it.

The film is also about the nature, power and dangerous temptations of art. The artist here is a poet because that’s the oldest of the arts, its timelessness validating this poet’s unlikely rock star — and even saviour’s — reception. Patti Smith provides the perfect poetic coda with The End of the World, combining the personal with the global.

This film is arguably unique because it makes no effort to be about people so much as about the universalized human condition. That makes it an allegory more than a story of psychological realism. 

Nobody has a name here. The end credits identify the mother, the man, the woman, the first two sons, and so on down through the supporting cast: the whisperer, the defiler, the zealot, etc. Bardem is set apart as Him, capitalized as if The god or the creative force in more secular terms, e.g., art. 

He is also the film’s primary subject of anatomy. It opens and closes on the woman (du jour), his new muse, beloved, who will rebuild his world, offer him the chance to have a son, and finally be sacrificed and replaced because he can’t suffer or allow her superior power. That’s the male world Aronofsky here challenges more cosmically than in Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan and Noah.
     Suddenly this is a very impressive canon. Now Darren Aronosky is a major auteur! 

The Hitman's Bodyguard

The Hitman’s Bodyguard draws on the classic romantic comedy plot where two bickering opposites discover harmony in each other. 

That was familiar safe even back when Shakespeare unleashed Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing (circa 1598; wow, even before TV). Antagonists become lovers. Or at least adequate room-mates, e.g. all The Odd Couples.

Hitman Kincaid kills the famous and ace security agent Bryce protects them. That makes them opposites, with Bryce apparently enjoying the moral superiority. 

They have a violent history, with complications. Kincaid accidentally wounded Bryce in one assignment. When Kincaid stumbled into another target and scored a miraculous hit on a Japanese drug-dealer, he unwittingly ruined Bryce’s confidence and career. Also his love-life, because Bryce assumed the killing of his client was due to his lover Amelia’s betrayal.  

In this narrative Amelia —  an Interpol officer— coerces Bryce into guarding the notorious Kincaid to ensure his testimony against a Russian crime boss at The Hague. Kincaid finds any security assistants an unnecessary encumbrance. He does better on his own. He survives all the massive assaults that eliminate his other guards. There are many.

Of course the two antagonists develop a respect and affection for each other. Indeed Kincaid acknowledges his unwanted partner’s effectiveness. He also helps Bryce win back Amelia, first by unheeded counsel, then by persuading her. Kincaid dangerously pauses his own mission to save the captured Bruce from torture. 

So the mercenary serial killer has a heart.  He even his own romantic weak spot, the wild Sonia, who has been jailed as a trap for Kincaid. Only to secure her release does he agree to testify. 

Both women are strong. Amelia fights off an attack by her boss, the Russian mole. Kincaid meets Sonia when she wins a (co-ed) Mexican bar fight. She is best defined later, when she sits in the serenity of the Lotus position while spewing obscenities at Kincaid’s absence and at the men responsible for it. Sonia is so dominant her larger cell-mate cowers in the corner whenever commanded. 

Both men are given the strong women to assure the viewer that there’s nothing effeminate in their bromance. America’s penchant for tightly-bonded male heroes often suggests a suppressed homosexual relationship, from Tom and Huck down to Starsky and Hutch, Butch and Sundance, etc., etc. They’re given at least one hetero interest to absolve them. 

Kincaid’s virtue is telegraphed by the tattoo on his neck and arm. The image of crows departing a skeletal tree evokes his first kill. We see that tree and birds when the teen-age Kincaid murders the brute who killed Kincaid’s pastor father. That set Kincaid’s career path. 

The tattoo counteracts the Biblical mark of Cain, which brands the murderer as evil.  This contract killer snuffs only the evil, whom the supposed hero Bryce is paid to protect. The moral advantage has shifted. 
     This intelligent comic thriller has two driving energies. One is the virtually non-stop physical action, the chases and attacks. The other is the verbal intensity, comic, profane, often graphically poetic. Both advance the bonding of apparent but not true opposites. 

Tulip Fever

British TV director Justin Chadwick’s film debut is like a 17th Century Dutch painting — in its historic and social setting, in its lighting but also and mainly in its themes. 

The film animates the details that the young portrait painter includes in his commissioned work: the love of beauty, reverence for nature, the temptation and fear of vanity and — most of all — its reminder of man’s mortality. Here all of our rich life and all our hopes remind us of death. “First flower, first fall,” master Sandvort says of a tulip but that truth rules the lovers’ lives as well. 

Of course this historic period piece essentially reflects on today. Why else revisit the past but to understand the now. 

  The madness of the tulip investment frenzy finds ample modern parallels in Nortel, the high tech, mortgage, marijuana and real estate bubbles, not to mention the evergreen turbulent stock market. There is always some current fever to tempt the gullible and greedy to get rich quick. And as so often, the vanity that believes in such unearned advancement oft proves disastrous.   

Vanity is the film’s — and the painting genre’s —  primary target. Out of vanity Sandvort buys his beautiful orphan wife Sophia like a precious jar and out of vanity pursues his hunger for a male heir.
      It is even vain of him to presume that it was his prayer — that God preserve the newborn infant over his first wife — that prompted God to take both. If he is vain to tell his friend that he’ll dump Sophia if she’s not pregnant in six months, he is moderated by his love to keep her. Indeed, at Sophia’s ostensible pregnancy Sandvort asks Dr Sorgh to save Sophia over the child, if the choice is necessary.

Out of vanity Sandvort commissions the double painting, even after the artist clearly exposes the vanity of human wishes and security. Of course the plan backfires when the painter and Sophia Sandvort fall in love.  

Both sets of young lovers risk their passions in pursuit of the tulip fortune that would fund their escape. Both are thwarted by folly. Maria’s young man makes his fortune. Falsely assuming her infidelity, he goes to a tavern where he is robbed of it and is shanghaied into the navy and off to Africa. He leaves his pregnant lover in the dark. (Well, in the even darker, given the film’s period lighting.) The artist briefly forgets he’s in art not business and bets his future on the tulip market. 

Of course there are other fevers than just the tulip. The minor one is the drunk’s helplessness before temptation, even when conducting that serious mission. A creature of appetite, he eats the bulb on which so many characters’ fates depend.

The other primary fever is love, which drives both young men into ruinous careers. So intense are the relationships that out of desperation Maria threatens to expose her dear and close mistress Sophia in order to save herself. Sophia spurns the doctor who offers to help her provide his husband’s heir. But to enable her escape with the artist she concocts the complex plot to pass Maria’s baby off as her own and to feign death. 

The film departs from the genre in its happy endings. None of the key characters die here. Sandvort, ashamed and defeated, bequeaths his house to Maria and makes a new fortune and family in the West Indies. 

The two young men also thrive, once they abandon their delusion of easy wealth. The fishmonger becomes master of the Sandvort estate. The artist achieves fame for his art. From sketching his nude lover he advances to a commission in the church — where he learns Sophia did not die after all but became a nun. Sophia realized she could not go through with her indulgent escape, nor could she return to the loving and betrayed Sandvort. So she returns to her original home, the convent. 

Love conquers all after all. As the abbess remarks, stories don't end; they just diverge. A painting freezes a moment in time. We read into it what may have led up to its composition and what we may deduce will ensue. But film continues through time, so it affords the grace of these happy resolutions. 
     The script shows Tom Stoppard’s usual level of intellectual ambition and clarity. There are also flashes of his wit. “What will you bid,” one man asks after an auction. “Farewell.” “Is that necessary?” Maria asks Dr Sorgh when he prepares to explore up her skirts. “Not really. Force of habit.” Hence Sophia’s return. 

Menashe

This yiddish-language film is so compelling as an ethnological study of the Brooklyn Hasidic orthodox Jewish community that we might overlook its universal theme. As Renoir put it in Rules of the Game, The terrible thing is that everyone has his reasons. 

The loser hero Menashe (that’s three syllables) wants to raise his young son Reuven whom he loves and enjoys being with. But the ruling rabbi cites the Torah injunction that a child must be raised by a couple. Menashe must marry if he wants his son back. 

But Menashe has already suffered through one loveless arranged marriage so doesn’t want another. On the other hand, he respects his dead wife enough to keep a movie of her on his cellphone. He insists on hosting her memorial service in his cramped flat instead of at her brother’s commodious home. That ceremony will prove he can be responsible — except it doesn’t. He burns the kugel. 

If the rabbi seems unfeeling when he rules against Menashe as a father, he has the saving excuse of total commitment to his faith. He brings a kind of order and stability to his people. He shows a saving grace when he insists Menashe’s kugel is not a failure, indeed “fit for a king.” The rabbi has his reasons. If the religious extremity seems inhumane the rabbi isn’t.

So has the brother-in-law, who resents Menashe’s callous treatment of his dying wife but is committed to giving nephew Reuven a life the boy’s father can’t. He’ll give the boy back when he can. 

The film focuses on the Hasidic male community. The men are seen praying, schmoozing, singing, dancing, drinking, everything together, no women present. 

The female fringe is their suffering largely invisible support: the mother on her third grocery trip that week to feed her eight children, the four-month widow on a date with the 12-month widower who insults her by saying she’s not his “type.” Another prospect is a beauty freshly divorced from her abusive husband. An unseen daughter wants to go to college but her father won’t let her.

When Menashe asks a neighbour for a kugel recipe she immediately offers to bake him one. The women’s reflex is to serve the men. That’s their place, their stability. In her kitchen, sullenly kneading the dough for the sabbath bread is another woman, beaten down, defeated.  

Quietly, the film traces Menashe’s reform. He’s criticized for not wearing a jacket and hat, for dressing like the grocery cashier he is. But his last appearance is in full suit and hat, striding through the Brooklyn streets. To recover his son he will accept the religious stricture, accept an arranged marriage, rein in his secular impulses and accept the regimen of his community. 

To the film’s credit this reform is only thus suggested. No specific explanation is given. Perhaps it was his failure to deliver even the supermarket kugel successfully, or the warmth of the rabbi’s support, or the realization that he had no alternative if he wanted his son back. Or it was the death of the baby chicken he was trying to raise on his own, for Reuven’s diversion and affection. 

But another scene is equally apposite. Menashe and two Latino coworkers get drunk and candid in the storeroom. The two Latinos sing their songs. They bemoan their wives and envy his bachelor freedom. That prompts him to recall the misery of his first marriage, his initial relief at her death. Then he reflects on his even greater misery now and perhaps at this point resolves upon his reform. He enjoys their community than remembers his difference. 
     He laughs away their suggestion they go get drunk together Friday night. That’s his people’s shabbes. So he takes the ritual bath and, purified of worldly contamination and self-interest, returns to the fold. A man as well as the women can abandon fulfilment for their restrictive faith.