Mommy (2014)
Directed by Xavier Dolan
A peculiar neighbor offers hope to a recent widow who is struggling to raise a teenager who is unpredictable and, sometimes, violent.
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(He could be airing out his dirty laundry, but hey.) Dolan’s juvenile greeting is both appropriate and hardly unexpected, coming from a filmmaker whose latest emotional tornado finds the time for masturbation jokes, Home Alone shout-outs, and cheesy-great ’90s music cues—filmed, for the most part, in a brazen 1:1 aspect ratio that’s sure to infuriate a few critics.
There are moments of intense humor, including one of the most infectiously laugh-along scenes of drunken female bonding that we've ever seen and right down to tiny details like Steve doing the Macauley Culkin "Home Alone" face when looking in the bathroom mirror.
Pilon, a handsome young man who could pass for Macaulay Culkin’s older cousin (Dolan even throws in a fun, passing reference to Home Alone), radiates vulnerability and menace in equal measure.
There’s a feeling that just about anything could happen — that a serious film could include a shout-out to “Home Alone” or milk agony out of a scene where someone karaokes Andrea Bocelli at a dive bar.
And his decision to shoot Mommy in a 1:1 aspect ratio—which on the big screen resembles the vertical view from a smartphone—is a gimmicky ploy for intimacy, not unlike Spike Lee offering one reel of Crooklyn in squeezed anamorphic.
But few dramas have confronted a parent’s struggles raising a problem child—not including 1990’s “Problem Child,” for obvious reasons.
The film’s final image brings to mind an iconic scene from François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, a classic of generational distemper that Dolan’s new film would sit happily next to on any true cinephile’s shelf.
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Despite the title, the focus isn’t just on Steve’s mother, Diane (aka “Die”), played by Anne Dorval (who played a less tolerant mom in Dolan’s directorial debut, “I Killed My Mother”).
But then, he did mount "I Killed My Mother" as his feature debut.
His first film, the semiautobiographical “I Killed My Mother,” made when he was 19, explored the betrayal he felt when his exasperated mother sent him off to boarding school.
Second, he's still as fascinated by the mother-son dynamic as he was in his 2009 semi-autobiographical debut, I Killed My Mother.
The former child actor (he still acts) made a splash with his debut, "I Killed My Mother," a cry from a rageful post-adolescent heart.
According to our production notes, he himself has strong feelings about his own mother, which he is playing out in his films beginning with his first creation "I Killed My Mother" (2009).
The main trio in “Mommy” — like the protagonists in Dolan’s “Heartbeats” and “Laurence Anyways” — take a brief respite inside their own cloistered mini-community, even if it’s bound to burst apart and re-expose them to the disarray of the real world.
(In fairness, that began to change noticeably with “Laurence Anyways” in 2012, which is overly long but mostly terrific.)
Young Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan (Laurence Anyways) continues to progress both visually and narratively while exploring familiar themes.
Though scarcely known in the States, where his sophomore feature “Heartbeats” earned just shy of $600,000, and “I Killed My Mother” and the gender-resistant romance “Laurence Anyways” received only minor arthouse releases, Dolan exploded on the international festival scene in 2009 with a textbook case of “therapy through filmmaking.”
Each of Dolan's previous efforts (I Killed My Mother, Heartbeats, Laurence Anyways and Tom at the Farm ) have received immense critical acclaim.
Centered on an incredible performance from Ann Dorval, with whom Dolan reunites after “Laurence Anyways” and a no less revelatory one from Antoine Olivier Pilon as her son, the film is brimming with the kind of directorial tics and tricks that would in most other contexts be loathsome, but practically every single one of them works here.
Their verbal battles — in a raw Quebec patois that necessitated showing this French-language film with French subtitles — would singe the ears of the bickering couple in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Recalling Andrea Arnold’s similarly angst-ridden teen drama Fish Tank (2009), Mommy blazes across the screen thanks to Dolan’s impeccable taste in pop music soundtracks and visual compositions.
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It’s par for the course, though, in a film that goes from threatening to bust into a musical in a mall parking lot or staging a shopping cart chase like a scene from The Blues Brothers to plunging into A Clockwork Orange-style intimations of state-sanctioned torture—there’s a scene in the back stretch, for example, that’s harder to watch than anything since David was dumped in the woods in A.I. It’s precisely this willingness on Dolan’s part to engage in the full emotional spectrum that makes the film so satisfying, rough edges and all.
Mommy is the Raging Bull of dysfunctional-family dramas, a story of the combative relationship between a mother and her son filled with delirious swells of effusive love and sudden plummets into madness and hate.