Review: Mommy (2014)

French-Canadian enfant terrible/auteur Xavier Dolan's fifth film (made when he was a mere 25 years old) is a swirling cauldron of raw emotion, and a trio of irreparably broken people, seemingly forever locked within their own self-made prisons. It is a film that almost slaps you in the face with it's sheer raw impact, but in doing so, overwhelms.

It must be said, however, that Dolan is a man incredibly gifted with a unique eye. His eclectic mix of omnipresent camera movement, floating slow-motion, and swirling, shimmering colors mixes together to create a film that is, by all means, amazing to look at. In fact, more often then not, the film seems to be more of a visual tone poem, with raw imagery that recalls the work of Terrence Malick, albeit contained within a far more direct, straightforward narrative then Malick's sprawling theological meditations.

Dolan films a good 95% of the film in the deliberately constrictive 1:1 aspect ratio (literally a perfect square). In doing so, he forces the audience into the world of the characters, allowing us no room to breathe or look away from the sheer amount of intense emotion and steady self destruction the characters undergo. The only exceptions are two brief sequences where the aspect ratio widens to 1:85.1, and in those two sequences (probably only amount to maybe 15 minutes of screen time), the film finally allows itself a release. Those are the only moments where we see our characters truly happy, and free from the demons that plague them. It's telling that the second sequence is a brilliantly executed day-dream, where Anne Dorval's overwhelmed mother imagines a better life for her and her belligerent, antisocial son (Antoine-Olivier Pilon), where things finally manage to work out. Alas, it is not to be, and the aspect ratio once more suffocates them, as reality comes knocking, and she commits her son to a mental institution due to his increasingly violent (and suicidal) behavior.

The cast, which is basically just Anne Dorval, Antoine-Olivier Pilon and Suzanne Clément, are all incredible in their roles. Dorval's portrait of an overwhelmed, middle-class mother trying to raise a son suffering from some sort of extreme personality disorder (stated to be ADHD) is finely textured. There's no glamour, or romanticizing of it. She's clearly in over her head, but is either unwilling or unable to realize that her son, brilliantly played by Antoine-Olivier Pilon, is simply too violent and self-destructive to be cared for. Speaking of Pilon, his character is a swirling monster of rage and self loathing, coupled with a borderline Oedipal obsession over his mother. Yet, at the same time, it's painfully obvious that he is also broken by his father's death, two years earlier. The closest the film gets to a truly 'normal' person is Suzanne Clément, who suffers from a debilitating stutter, and attempts to tutor the son. The three of them try to help each other, but, as pressures from the outside world continue to build, such as a looming lawsuit due to the son setting a sanitarium cafeteria on fire while in a rage, which burned off 75% of another patient's face, the son slits his own wrists, which sends whatever hope for healing directly out the window.

The ending of the film in particular, is quite telling. After more or less deciding to relent her son to a government facility, thereby destroying the trust between the pair, we cut ahead a few months. The son is now always wearing a straitjacket, and the tutor must leave town due to her own husband's job, thereby taking the last sliver of what could have been healing with her. The mother is last seen weeping in her bedroom, unable to handle the emotional weight of her actions, and the film ends with the son, having been briefly released from his straitjacket, running directly towards a third floor window, before the film smash-cuts to black. His ultimate fate is left unknown to us, but given his previous suicide attempt, and the fact that his mother no longer communicates with him, it's easy to extrapolate an ending where he simply throws himself out the window in a final, ultimate expression of his self destructive and violent nature.

And in the end, that ending scene is the most important. The film leaves our characters trapped. The boy is in an asylum, likely in his final seconds of life. The mother is overwhelmed, sobbing and alone. The tutor is forced to leave, unable to have really helped the two. These people are broken, irreparably so, and Dolan provides them no method of escape.

In the end, Mommy is a film that I no doubt respect, but find hard to love. It's sheer unrelenting emotional intensity makes it draining to watch, and it's desolate, sudden ending, gives a sense of terminal doom to the proceedings. It overwhelmed me, and while I understand the respect and adulation it received, it's a film that I'm reluctant to experience again. It's a film where everything is turned to an eleven, and no real release or relief is in sight. These people are broken, and forever shall be.

5 stars, but, as I said above, it's not a film I wish to experience again. It's all simply too much.