Connective Tissue: Film Review of Mother Mary
★★★☆
Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
The Hollywood buddy film is a time-tested audience favorite. Movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, The Odd Couple, and Lethal Weapon have been immensely popular, spawning endless sequels and spinoffs. Of course, the concept of two guys teaming up to fight a crime (or to commit one) is nothing new.
This conceit can be traced backed to the epic of Gilgamesh, the plays of Shakespeare, and modern pop productions like Batman and Robin or Star Trek. While male buddy films mostly focus on guys working together for a common goal and discovering friendship almost by accident, female buddy films have a wider emotional range. Some critics have averred that the boy buddy films of the seventies were a reaction to the feminist movement, a counterreaction that pushed women out of the picture—literally.
Issues of misogyny, equity, abandonment, and betrayal characterize female buddy films like Thelma and Louise, Fried Green Tomatoes, Beaches, and A League of Their Own and influence relationships between the people that are in them. Of course, the iterations of these relationships are as varied as any of these very different characters. Sisters, rivals, mentors, and proteges are only a few examples of women in this genre. Perhaps because women in our society often struggle for equity and a voice, questions of identity and authority often color these themes friendship, love, and betrayal.
David Lowery’s new film Mother Mary pushes the boundaries of this subgenre to strange new surreal and mysterious landscapes, so mysterious, in fact, that they are very nearly indecipherable.
At the beginning of the film, pop music superstar Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) is getting dressed for a concert that will be her first after a terrible onstage accident. Gripped by doubt and dissatisfied with her dress, she goes to see her former dressmaker and old friend Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel) who she abruptly dropped from her circle years before.
Sam has by this time established her own fashion brand and has prospered, but she is understandably bitter towards Mary and at first refuses to help her. Mary eventually wears her down and the two go to the renovated barn Sam has turned into her studio to work on the new dress.
Here, the two engage in a long, convoluted dialogue that slowly reveals a close friendship that lasted years, encompassing Mary’s rise to superstardom, Sam’s unwavering support of her, and their subsequent split.
Sam will not easily forgive her old friend. Mary is a little hurt when she learns Sam hasn’t listened to any of her new music since the split. She asks if she would like to hear her newest song “Spooky Action”, (the title being a reference to the phenomenon of quantum entanglement where two particles become so linked, the actions of one are immediately recognized in the second—a rather painfully obvious metaphor), but Sam refuses.
Mary instead shows her the choreography for the song which performs on the studio floor. The dance is punctuated only by grunts, footsteps, and intense, almost spasmodic, movements. When Mary suggests a dress made of her older iconic costumes, Sam realizes she is flailing creatively, as well as emotionally and physically.
Sam then tells Mary about the last Mother Mary concert she saw and being so hurt by Mary’s rejection that the tension cracked one of her wisdom teeth. She goes on to recount how a sort of vaporous red entity—a spirit—came out of her tooth.
Mary then tells of being at a séance with her posse and how a young girl named Imogen (FKA Twigs) becomes possessed and cuts open Mary’s hand. Later that night, the red ghost attempted to enter Mary through her hand, but she escaped. Later, exhausted by her tour, she sees the ghost onstage and falls backing away from it. During the incident, the ghost enters her. Part of the reason she has returned to Sam is that she is still haunted by the specter. She cannot sleep and is miserable.
Sam proposes an unorthodox and somewhat surreal solution to their mutual problem which will exorcise their mutual demon as well, reconcile their differences, and heal old wounds.
Mother Mary is a beautifully shot and choreographed film. The elaborate concert sequences are impeccably staged, and Hathaway fills the stage as well as Taylor or Beyonce ever could. She sings all the songs herself and acquits herself admirably. The costumes are a cross between high fashion and Las Vegas glitz (in the Taytay mold) and are distinguished by Mother Mary’s trademark halo.
Weaving together threads of healing a fractured friendship while working through both Sam and Mary’s creative process is backbone of this film. The introduction of supernatural elements into this two-hander is somewhat puzzling, but Lowery folds it seamlessly into the narrative.
The specter itself, depicted by a floating piece of red cloth, is a cypher which begs some sort of interpretation. Is it symbolic of the friends’ love or the ghost of the creative ventures they once shared? Is it emblematic of the guilt Mary may have felt for dumping her long-time friend (lover?) and creative associate? A guilt born of Sam’s anguish which grew inside Mary’s soul? The clues—if there are any—are frustratingly few and far between.
Part of Lowery’s style, at least in his less traditional works, is to work his narrative mainly through visuals. In A Ghost Story, the last two-thirds of the film have virtually no dialogue, so the interpretation of the narrative is necessarily ambiguous, yet the direction of the story seems obvious even if the final resolution does not. It’s only human nature to try to glean meaning from patterns, stories, or art, so when a film like Mother Mary suddenly brings in the unexpected supernatural element, it throws us for a loop. Intuitively, it seems to make sense, but the narrative’s sudden dip into the surreal is disconcerting, to say the least.
When it does turn toward the surreal, the imagery is nothing short of breathtaking. The sequences of Mary resisting the specter are filmed with a solid black background, lending a dreamlike quality to the film. Mary’s dance sequence is haunting and somewhat harrowing. It almost seems as if she is performing a sort of penance or religious rite for Sam.
I had doubts that Anne Hathaway would be able to pull off the larger-than-life persona of pop superstar, but she turns in a more than exceptional performance. The contrast between her leggy strutting and magnificent stage presence and the vulnerable side she reveals when talking to Sam is remarkable. She seems to shrink two or three inches.
For her part, Michaela Cole is by turns hauntingly intense and unrelentingly fierce in her portrayal of a woman who will eventually forgive but never forget. Her piercing eyes and sculpted cheekbones evoke the visage of a vengeful goddess, a wronged Athena or jilted Aphrodite.
The first half of the film is all two-handed dialogue, much of which is repetitive and somewhat mundane. When the occult elements kick in, and Lowery turns to his more visual aspects of storytelling, the film breaks into a beautiful surrealism evoking an emotional depth the words cannot touch.
Mother Mary is a beautiful film, fascinating despite its muddiness and occasional banality, and is well worth seeing for, if nothing else, the sterling performances of its two main actors and the depiction of the connective tissue of the undying friendship between them.
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