Darren Aronofsky’s mother! is one of the most divisive movies recently made—like most of Aronofsky’s films. With Noah, even the Christian community couldn’t decide if it was blasphemous or beautiful. The Fountain was as passionately hated as it was loved. And mother!…yeah, there’s a lot of polar opposite feelings. Its Cinemascore is an F while a 68% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.
Now, the marketing department of mother! is embracing the divide:
When talking about mother! with The Frame‘s John Horn, Aronofsky said this of the “F” score:
What’s interesting about that is, like, how if you walk out of this movie are you not going to give it an “F?” It’s a punch. It’s a total punch. And I realize that we were excited by that. We wanted to make a punk movie and come at you. And the reason I wanted to come is because I was very sad and I had a lot of anguish and I wanted to express it. Filmmaking is such a hard journey. People are constantly saying no to you. And to wake up every morning and get out of bed and to face all those no’s, you have to be willing to really believe in something. And that’s what I look for in my collaborators and what I pitched the actors I said, Look, this isn’t going to be a popularity contest. We’re basically holding up a mirror to what’s going on. All of us are doing this. But that final chapter hasn’t been written and hopefully things can change. And, to go back, the fact that it’s going down right now and things are really falling apart in a way that is really scary.
It’s scary when you talk to the people who are studying this and thinking about this and then you have other people who basically believe in the power of a iPhone that they can communicate to 35 million people in a blink of an eye, yet they don’t believe in science in other ways. You know, which is as proven as gravity at this point, really. It has as many people believe in it as believe in gravity. And it scares me and it’s time to start screaming. So I wanted to howl. And this was my howl. And some people are not going to want to listen to it. That’s cool.
Our own Dewey Singleton gave it three stars, check out his review here.
