Mother Mary Review

Mother Mary and the Myth of the Singular Artist

By: Marc Kozak

Mother Mary

Mother Mary and the Myth of the Singular Artist

By: Marc Kozak

No matter what you think of David Lowery’s newest film, Mother Mary, most of your thoughts and feelings will likely be directed towards one of three people. Sure, you will have opinions about the two leads, Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel – how much you liked or didn’t like their performances, what you thought about what they were wearing, what you think about them generally as actors and celebrity personalities. But as for what you thought about the movie itself, those praises or curses will be forever associated with writer/director David Lowery. Whenever you see his name in the future, you will think about your experience with Mother Mary and be more or less inclined to engage with his future or past work as a result. If a conversation breaks out about the movie, you might even say something like, “I love David Lowery’s stuff” or “David Lowery is pretentious as hell.”

This is just how it goes in an era where auteur theory is king. Even though every movie is the work of hundreds, if not thousands of individual artists, it’s the director that ultimately has to be the one to “wear the dress,” as the movie puts it. Mother Mary is largely about Lowery struggling with the idea of his name being the one up in lights while many of his talented collaborators garner far less (if any) conversation. It’s telling that the first names in the end credits are the designers who worked on the dresses in the movie – costume designer Bina Daigeler, in collaboration with Dutch couturier Iris van Herpen for the finale dress.

Instead of making yet another movie about people who make movies, Lowery wisely transposes these thoughts about creative collaboration onto the world of pop music stardom, another form of public-facing art that requires the input of numerous songwriters, producers, engineers, set designers, stagehands and publicists, even though the individual pop star is the one that gets all of the credit. In today’s world, pop stars are almost religious objects of veneration, public icons who gather followers in the millions, many of whom are desperate to get even the tiniest glimpse into their holy world.

Anne Hathaway plays Mother Mary, a worldwide pop icon known for her elaborately hypnotic stage shows and exquisite sense of fashion. We see snippets of her performing in front of arenas full of screaming fans, crooning moody and almost indecipherable lyrics that go along with original songs created for the movie by Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX. She is an instantly recognizable figure, an analogue to Taylor Swift or Beyoncé, someone who dominates the culture in a way that very few can.

" The last hour of Mother Mary is truly an endurance test for how much metaphor and abstraction the viewer can handle.  "

Even though it seems like she has it all, we quickly learn that isn’t the case – after the opening montage establishes who Mother Mary is, we watch as she shows up weary and drenched in rain to the English estate of famous fashion designer Sam Anselm (Coel), who confidently commands an army of assistants as they scurry around preparing for their own big show over the weekend. Sam isn’t exactly happy to see her former best friend and collaborator; the two haven’t spoken in over ten years. But Mary has shown up at her doorstep to beg her to make her a dress for her big comeback performance after an extremely horrifying onstage accident. After laying out some ground rules, Sam reluctantly agrees.

For the next 45 minutes, the movie becomes a talky chamber drama between the two old friends, set entirely in Sam’s gigantic barn where she does most of her work. Anselm’s barn is just like Mary’s stage, a large, blank canvas on which to create, albeit alone. It’s fascinating to watch Sam gleefully hold so much power over the vastly more famous Mary, who can only shiver in the corner and wince every time someone touches her to take her measurements. Sam is in full control of the situation, and she is luxuriating in it. The two eventually start hashing out their past, and we learn the depths of Sam’s resentment – she is angry at Mary for leaving her behind during Mary’s meteoric rise to superstardom, one that Sam believes she had more than a little hand in. Sam has made a point not to listen to any of Mary’s music since they split and holds on to that little rebellion even as she forces Mary to soundlessly go through the choreography for her new song. It’s here where things start to shift, Sam clearly moved by Mary’s physically frantic and emotionally draining performance (impressively brought to life by a seemingly possessed Hathaway). Sensing that there is more at play here than meets the eye, Sam begins to get excited about the act of creating a dress that will prove itself to be the ultimate creative expression of their collaboration.

The movie’s first half is a fascinating if at times slightly laborious psychological drama, as you can practically hear Lowery arguing with himself about the nature of his own collaborations, maybe wondering if any of his team might resent him while he’s gathered plaudits for movies like The Green Knight and A Ghost Story, imbuing him with more power and opportunities in an industry that tosses around many millions of dollars. Some viewers might be impatient for the movie to move on to the fireworks, but if you find yourself wondering what the movie is all about after it’s over, most of the answers lie in this extended conversation.

Things certainly get wacky from here, as the movie’s back half becomes a genre story of ghostly possession that layers on enough metaphors to require a large whiteboard to sort them all out. It turns out that the night Sam left Mary, she had a dream about some sort of red specter leaving her body via a cracked tooth, which she took as a sign that she was free from the trap of Mary’s influence. Mary listens to this story with increasing horror, finally revealing that not too long after Sam’s dream, Mary had a similar dream in which the same red specter entered her body, pulling at her soul, preventing her from sleeping, and causing the terrible onstage accident that almost killed her. This red ghost is a manifestation of the connection between Sam and Mary, and a metaphor for how neither of them can fully express themselves without the help of the other. In order to stop the chaos, the two must forgive each other for the pain they caused and open themselves to each other once again.

It all sounds simple enough in theory, but the last hour of Mother Mary is truly an endurance test for how much metaphor and abstraction the viewer can handle. Take the scene in which the red ghost comes to enter Mary – she is at a birthday party with some friends messing around with an Ouija board (as you do), culminating in Mary having her hand gashed open by a possessed Imogen (FKA twigs, doing tremendous work) while Daniel Hart’s score hits peak volume and a giant red ghost dress flies into Mary’s body. It’s all delightfully weird, full of atmosphere and uniquely beautiful visuals, but as much as I was personally enjoying it, I couldn’t help but think that the movie might’ve just lost a lot of people.

Still, for others, there will surely be tons of rewards to be found in numerous rewatches. Lowery packs in enough symbolism to bury a religious scholar, as every color, image, and number painted on Mary’s body carries significance, if you’re open to finding it. As is typical for Lowery’s work, he sometimes allows the aesthetics to overpower the narrative, but if you’re like me, that’s almost a feature instead of a bug. I imagine most people will leave the theater asking themselves what any of what they watched even means, which is never a great signifier for box office (or even critical) success. Regardless, I have always admired Lowery for his ambition and atypical approach to storytelling, and I suspect Mother Mary will grow in my estimation the more I watch it.

Hathaway will rightly receive praise for her stylish portrayal of a pop diva; she probably could’ve been a real-life pop star if she really wanted to. However, it’s really Coel who steals the show, commanding the attention of the camera, which can’t help but focus in closely on the intensity of her penetrating stares and swaggering bravado. You can believe that her character is a strong and stubborn woman who has fortified herself to become even stronger after her split with Mary, making it all the more satisfying when all of the walls finally come down in the end.

Mother Mary is bound to be a polarizing movie – if you are expecting a straight-forward horror/thriller about a pop star, you’re not going to get it. Lowery obfuscates his narrative with a lot of style and aesthetic, but at its core, it’s a simple story about two spirits fighting to be reconnected after suffering alone, bound together by a shared creative vision. It’s a vision that can’t be torn apart, even by ten years of separation or the intervention of supernatural forces. What could speak more to the power of collaborative art than that?