REVIEW: 'Mother Mary' is made of flimsy material
Michaela Coel and Anne Hathaway star in Mother Mary, written and directed by David Lowery.
Like the best concerts, I guess you just had to be there. Maybe being in the room as writer-director David Lowery and his collaborators put together Mother Mary would have helped the movie make more sense. There are so many promising components here: Star performances from Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, a story that references the brutal costs of fame, songs by Charli XCX and FKA Twigs, and striking, horror-tinged visuals. But whatever ideas the cast and crew discussed during production, very little made it onto the screen.
Mother Mary ends up ringing hollow, as scene after scene unravels with unnecessarily heightened dialogue, and the core relationship between the titular Lady Gaga-esque artist (Hathaway) and her dressmaker (Coel) never coheres. No matter how many bold colours and theatrical scene transitions are thrown at us, the basic information we need to help us sympathize with the characters is held at a remove. It’s one thing to trust the audience to pick up key details from context, but it’s another to do so as obsessively as Mother Mary, where you yearn for some foundational facts just to ground yourself.
Namely: What did Mother Mary do that so poisoned her friendship and partnership with Sam Anselm (Coel)? We’re told they worked together for over a decade and that Sam was instrumental in developing the pseudo-religious look that defines Mary’s act. But from the way Sam behaves, you’d swear Mary destroyed her reputation (and maybe killed a family member). Yet Sam runs a successful fashion house on a huge farm property, so apparently the betrayal was more personal. Were they romantic partners? Again, the movie doesn’t disclose, but the two women speak to each other in a way that seems far more intimate than (former) good friends or coworkers.
No matter the answer, Mary turns up uninvited at Sam’s door, soaked to the skin from a thunderstorm, to ask her to make a new dress for an upcoming comeback show. Despite confessing later to hating Mary so much that she once clenched her jaw and cracked a wisdom tooth, Sam nevertheless agrees to throw aside her commitments and make the dress, as if under some spell. Of course, the making of the dress is an elaborate metaphor for the (supposed) healing of their relationship, an element the movie tries to defuse by having Mary complain, “These metaphors are exhausting.” You and me both, sister!
Anne Hathaway’s Mother Mary performs songs written by Charli XCX and FKA Twigs.
If the sketchy backstories weren’t enough, long chunks of the dialogue consist of elevated, wordy exchanges between the two leads, in a form of therapy-speak. It’s as if both women are trying to out-compete each other to acknowledge the other’s trauma, but then refuse to discuss what drove them apart. This heightened language, combined with how the movie gestures at a supernatural connection between Mary and Sam, makes it feel like Lowery and the filmmakers wanted the movie to be a medieval fantasy, complete with ghosts and spells and bolts of lightning illuminating stone buildings. But it never commits to the supernatural occurrences really taking place for the characters; instead, it can all be dismissed as elaborate dreams or renderings of their psychologies. Somehow, I was reminded of Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria - at least in that movie, the dance academy really was a coven of bloodthirsty witches!
Mother Mary throws a lot at the viewer, in true style-over-substance fashion. The clips of Mary performing in huge venues are electric, made more convincing by the real-life pop stars who provided the music. The costumes attributed to Sam and her successors are works of art, even if we never dwell on Sam’s creative process. In fact, for a movie that pays so much lip service to creativity – who gets credit for something, what it says about the person who makes it or wears it – Mother Mary feels bored by the act of creation. We never learn why Mary includes so much religious imagery in her work, or how Sam approaches a new garment. All of that is window dressing for the mutual trauma-dumping.
The timing of the movie’s release is also funny: Michaela Coel has another movie out right now, Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers, which deals with the ideas of authorship and inspiration. She plays a painter and art forger, and by the end you have a complete appreciation of where her character came from and her perspective on creativity. But that movie is far more deliberate in its storytelling, whereas Mother Mary’s goals are entirely ephemeral. Apparently Sam Anselm can make dresses out of a ghost’s…ectoplasm? Seems like something worth diving into!
Mother Mary gets two stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
I’m not asking for the characters to speak exclusively in TikTok slang, but something resembling a human conversation would’ve been nice.
It’s hard for any blood-red ghost to top the one in Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak, but the one here made out of floating fabric seems extra lazy.