By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 5 cats
Director: Xavier Dolan
Starring: Alexandre Goyette | Anne Dorval | Antoine-Olivier Pilon | Patrick Huard | Suzanne Clément
Country: canada
Year: 2014
Running time: 139
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3612616/combine
Chris says: “Those familiar with Quebecois wunderkind Xavier Dolan’s small, extraordinary oeuvre may notice the title and remember that his first feature was called I KILLED MY MOTHER. This, his fifth, is not a sequel, but it occasionally scans as a twisted, alternate-reality mirror of the earlier film. What registers next is the conspicuous 1:1 aspect ratio, rendering the canvas an intentionally claustrophobic square box. It requires an adjustment of perception on the viewer’s part, but you easily acclimate yourself and go along for the ride. Dolan, who has already made what I consider two great films (I KILLED MY MOTHER and LAURENCE ANYWAYS scores again with MOMMY, another epic character study. Drunk on style but packed with substance, it bespeaks life experience on a level that’s unexpected from a 25-year-old.
“Once again, Anne Dorval plays the mother, here named Diane (often going by the somewhat self-immolating nickname ‘Die’), but she’s considerably earthier (and a little trashier) than Chantle, her bourgeois matron of the earlier film. Now too old to play her teenaged son, Dolan remains behind the camera, casting Antoine-Olivier Pilon as Steve, an alter ego but not necessarily a stand-in. To put it lightly, 14-year-old Steve has serious behavioral issues—Die dismisses it as ADHD, but it’s blindingly apparent there’s some mental illness present. Early on, we learn Steve has been living in a detention center. After he starts a fire that severely injures a fellow inmate, Die offers to take him back into her home. Although he initially comes off like your average bratty and precocious teen, within seconds, he can become horrifically violent, physically lashing out at whomever provokes him (in most cases, it’s Die). Following one of his episodes, a third central figure drifts into focus: Kyla (Suzanne Clément), a shy, secretive neighbor. Curiously, she starts spending all her time with Die and Steve, bonding with them to a degree we almost never see when she’s with her own husband and child.
“Dorval, so good in I KILLED MY MOTHER, is even better as Die. She makes a vivid impression right from the first scene, where a car crash and the Sarah McLachlan song ‘Building A Mystery’ collide. You can detect her lineage in a long line of self-absorbed, tarted-up, generally inappropriate-but-still-loving mother figures, from Gena Rowlands in A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE to Jennifer Saunders in ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS—if MOMMY was in English and distributed by, say, Fox Searchlight, there’d certainly be Oscar buzz around her performance. In what will likely be his breakthrough role, Pilon is more than capable of expressing and validating Steve’s startling mood swings, while Clément, an absolutely towering presence in LAURENCE ANYWAYS, is nearly unrecognizable here, speaking in a most tentative stutter and dressed so blandly as if to nearly disappear into her surroundings.
“Still, there’s a reason why Dolan is receiving the most accolades for the film (he shared Best Director at Cannes with no less a living legend than Jean-Luc Godard): regardless of whether your own sensibility is compatible with Dolan’s, in every frame, you know you’re watching the work of someone with a limitless artistic vision. He makes a dull Montreal suburb seem both otherworldly and approachable. The soundtrack, as usual, is stirring and immense, using artists as disparate as Vivaldi and Lana Del Rey, breathing life into an overfamiliar standard like Oasis’ ‘Wonderwall’, even redeeming an unloved, half-forgotten hit like Dido’s ‘White Flag’ And, rather than constricting his scope, the box-like aspect ratio allows Dolan to piece together a different way of seeing: his oblique camera angles and unpredictable, swooping pans are completely in sync with all the chaotic, swerving emotions expressed by the three main characters—keep this in mind while watching, for Dolan actually rewards those paying attention to this dichotomy (to say anything less cryptic would spoil the fun in discovering it).
“MOMMY is not flawless. The title cards, which establish a legal reason for Die taking custody of Steve via a new Canadian law ‘passed in 2015’ (when the film’s ostensibly set) are muddled and completely unnecessary. Although nearly a half-hour shorter than the 168-minute LAURENCE ANYWAYS, it still feels a tad long. However, apart from those title cards, I can’t think of a good reason to cut anything. Dolan may be self-indulgent, but he’s never, ever boring. Often, he’s genuinely brilliant—nothing, nothing I’ve seen in many years is more poignant than the scene of Die, Steve and Kyla dancing together in a darkened kitchen to Celine Dion’s ‘On Ne Change Pas’ or as intense and breathtaking as the extended fast-forward montage set to a modern classical piece late in the film. Earlier, I alluded to A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE and while Dolan’s aesthetic is nothing at all like John Cassavetes’, he’s the rare auteur today making movies that are just as messy and passionate and uncompromising and sublime. 5 cats
“(MOMMY screened at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.)”
Brett says: “Since there was one reply to the original write-up, I don’t see the harm in following up. I concur with every word said about the film MOMMY. It is so well done that the couple of flaws that plague the film don’t bother me like they normally would, and those flaws are some that are usually pretty tough to endure. That alone, for me, really shows me what an exceptional talent young Dolan really is, despite his questionable decisions at times. The ‘flaws’ in question were perfectly addressed in the original review; I have not spoken with anyone in the group about the film, so it is gratifying to see my exact same observations mirrored by Chris. The lead actress performace, I agree, is likely to make my ‘year’s best’ list: Oscar-worthy consideration for sure, but again, it won’t realistically come near to getting that kind of recognition because of factors we are all familiar with when it comes to the non-U.S., non-Hollywood neglect.
“It is the kind of film that has a lot of elements that make me want to consider it for Best Picture. Yet, the areas in which it misses are painfully noticeable for me. Clearly, the alternate Canadian government legislation is one of those forehead-slap instigators. Another thing that hasn’t been mentioned that has nagged at me is how Dolan hides behind his decision about using 1:1, and he explained the decision to use that in such a way that made it seem like it was totally a normal thing to do and swore there were no real artistic/’artsy’ reasons for shooting it like that. For me, that is really hard to buy. If there was not any ‘artsy’ reason to do it, then why not shoot it like a standard film? That attention-drawing aspect of the film still has not been satisfactorily explained. And not that it needs to be, but the sheepish avoidance of the issue as ‘nothing special’ or ‘not artistically motivated’ is bogus and faux modest at best.
“Still, I find myself going back to MOMMY as having so many elements of amazing film-making that despite its shortcomings, it’s still one of the standout films of the year.”
Kyle says: “Checking information on the IMDB about the career to date of 25-year-old wunderkind Xavier Dolan reveals the astonishing numbers ’39 wins and 47 nominations’ — one of which is the 2014 Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize shared with legendary French director Jean-Luc Godard for GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE. MOMMY is the story of a mother, her son, and their neighbor, each trying with increasing desperation to hang onto a skewed notion of normalcy, forming an impromptu extended family in an ultimately doomed search for connection and meaning. Without proper financial or temperamental support, widowed mother Diane Després (Anne Dorval) takes on the responsibility of bringing home from a juvenile detention facility her teenage son Steve, who is troubled by ADHD and violent rages, attempting to share home schooling and familial duties with neighbor Kyla (Suzanne Clément), herself emotionally troubled so deeply she can barely speak. The notion that all you need is love is examined, dismantled, patched together, and finally proved a heart-breaking failure.
“Neither a synopsis nor a list of citations comes close to clarifying the genius of this moving film and its youthful director. Those troubled by its loudness, its excessive length, its emotional devastation, its lack of narrative ease and character redemption, are invited to seek a curative elsewhere. Those who care about the capacity of cinema to expand our understanding of what it is to be human and why cinema is art’s major modern medium miss MOMMY at their peril. Xavier Dolan demonstrates a command of visual grammar, an understanding of the accumulation of moments to create a whole, and an ability to steer his actors to passions not even directors with twice his age and experience are capable of. His use of a 1/1 aspect ratio to frame a point of view consonant with scrutinizing life on handheld devices is as revolutionary now as Godard’s BREATHLESS was in 1959 — ‘gaudily emblazoned with its technical audacity as well as with Godard’s own artistic, literary, and cinematic enthusiasms,’ writes Richard Brody in Everything Is Cinema. How fitting that the two directors, the youngest and the oldest winners in Cannes Film Festival history, share the 2014 Jury Prize. 5 cats
‘Monday, January 12, 2015, at the Walter Reade Theater, Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York.’
Diane says: “Thanks to those who urged me to see MOMMY on the big screen. I had forgotten it was by Xavier Dolan, but his aesthetic came to my mind halfway through the film, as I was admiring Di’s great outfits (cf. LAURENCE ANYWAYS).
“I’m retrospectivley delighted that Anne Dorval was nom’ed for best actress: her ‘woman trying not to cry’ was original and superb. I would have nom’ed this for Best Use of Music. The variety, the lightly related lyrics, the lovely wordless bits to focus our emotions, and the use of songs for a dance scene, a karaoke scene, and to provide detail to a backstory provide the full range of what this category means to me.
“I only complain that Dolan thought he was qualified to do the English subtitling. His repeated neologisms ‘Imma’ and “‘ight” etc. are intended to show us non-Francophones that the characters use informal speech, but they only make the dialogue opaque. 4 cats, maybe 5“