Mother Mary: between metaphors and songs, a pretentious film

A singer steps onto a stage in front of tens of thousands of people who worship her as if she were a deity, and indeed her stage name Mother Mary leaves no room for doubt: within her there is something that belongs neither to the star nor to the woman. Something red, mysterious, all-consuming that inhabits her, that gives her the passion with which she performs on stage and that has made her a global star.

This is the premise of David Lowery's new film, distributed by the omnipresent A24, a label that now represents a distinct brand for productions that seek to combine the quality of independent cinema with an approach aimed at a wider audience. Yet on this occasion, something must have gone wrong...

Ghosts Past and Present

Lowery is the director of, among others, A Ghost Story (2017) and The Green Knight (2021), two works that built his reputation as an author capable of transforming the absence of answers into a complete visual experience. Two titles particularly appreciated by this writer, who was therefore quite perplexed by the viewing of Mother Mary, which in its hundred minutes proves to be an undoubtedly ambitious but also pretentious work, constantly contorting itself without finding an effective key to understanding the core of the story.

The plot ventures into the territory of contemporary pop culture, relying on Anne Hathaway who throws herself body, soul, and voice – yes, she personally performs the numerous songs in the screenplay – into the role of the tormented protagonist, modeled on global commercial music stars. But as long as it is limited to stage performances, the whole still possesses its own personality, with visual and evocative interludes and melodies that showcase good work on an aesthetic and sound level.

On and Off Stage

The problems begin when the conflict that drives almost the entirety of the narrative reveals its structure as a two-voice litany: Mary travels to the isolated country mansion of Sam Anselm, her former best friend and costume designer who built her image at the beginning of her career and with whom she then lost contact years ago, absorbed as everything that is swallowed by the star system is absorbed. Sam, who hasn't listened to her music in ten years, does not receive her in the best way. The expressiveness and rough voice of Michaela Coel give the character a restrained and restless fury, ready to explode when the story takes a cryptic and surreal turn, with the spirit world as a new scenario to investigate.

And it is then that Mother Mary ends up (over)relying too much on its own metaphors and too little on the viewer, who might decide not to play along, given also the excessive verbosity of certain passages and some scenes visibly lengthened to reach the desired running time. The presence that haunts the two protagonists, a pseudo-material incarnation of something intangible that the audience must discover, also allows for more or less sought-after citations – just look at that fire-colored globe reminiscent of the iconic short film The Red Balloon (1956) – but it resolves into a self-serving mass, the result of self-congratulation that, ultimately, goes nowhere.

To Be and Not To Be

The comparison with a conceptually similar film like Brady Corbet's Vox Lux (2018) is inevitable and unfavorable: there, Natalie Portman's character lived in a narrative context solid enough to support the symbolist drifts, while here the psychological depth of the two women and their background is taken for granted, without fully exploring what generates their conflicted relationship.

Thus remains the bitterness for what Mother Mary could have been but, in its definitive essence, is not. Absent nuances and a narrative that seeks easy, gratuitous, and inorganic effect solutions for the meager context introduced, make the whole an exhausting amalgam, which only breathes when its protagonist is finally free on stage, microphone in hand, ready to express through song what words and events failed to convey in the actual story.